No Arabic abstract
Blockchain is increasingly being used to provide a distributed, secure, trusted, and private framework for energy trading in smart grids. However, existing solutions suffer from lack of privacy, processing and packet overheads, and reliance on Trusted Third Parties (TTP). To address these challenges, we propose a Secure Private Blockchain-based (SPB) framework. SPB enables the energy producers and consumers to directly negotiate the energy price. To reduce the associated packet overhead, we propose a routing method which routes packets based on the destination Public Key (PK). SPB eliminates the need for TTP by introducing atomic meta-transactions. The two transactions that form a meta-transaction are visible to the blockchain participants only after both of them are generated. Thus, if one of the participants does not commit to its tasks in a pre-defined time, then the energy trade expires and the corresponding transaction is treated as invalid. The smart meter of the consumer confirms receipt of energy by generating an Energy Receipt Confirmation (ERC). To verify that the ERC is generated by a genuine smart meter, SPB supports authentication of anonymous smart meters which in turn enhances the privacy of the meter owner. Qualitative security analysis shows the resilience of SPB against a range of attacks.
Blockchain is increasingly being used as a distributed, anonymous, trustless framework for energy trading in smart grids. However, most of the existing solutions suffer from reliance on Trusted Third Parties (TTP), lack of privacy, and traffic and processing overheads. In our previous work, we have proposed a Secure Private Blockchain-based framework (SPB) for energy trading to address the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we present a proof-on-concept implementation of SPB on the Ethereum private network to demonstrates SPBs applicability for energy trading. We benchmark SPBs performance against the relevant state-of-the-art. The implementation results demonstrate that SPB incurs lower overheads and monetary cost for end users to trade energy compared to existing solutions.
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading can facilitate integration of a large number of small-scale producers and consumers into energy markets. Decentralized management of these new market participants is challenging in terms of market settlement, participant reputation and consideration of grid constraints. This paper proposes a blockchain-enabled framework for P2P energy trading among producer and consumer agents in a smart grid. A fully decentralized market settlement mechanism is designed, which does not rely on a centralized entity to settle the market and encourages producers and consumers to negotiate on energy trading with their nearby agents truthfully. To this end, the electrical distance of agents is considered in the pricing mechanism to encourage agents to trade with their neighboring agents. In addition, a reputation factor is considered for each agent, reflecting its past performance in delivering the committed energy. Before starting the negotiation, agents select their trading partners based on their preferences over the reputation and proximity of the trading partners. An Anonymous Proof of Location (A-PoL) algorithm is proposed that allows agents to prove their location without revealing their real identity. The practicality of the proposed framework is illustrated through several case studies, and its security and privacy are analyzed in detail.
Insurance is one of the fundamental services offered to the citizens to reduce their costs and assist them in case of an emergency. One of the most important challenges in the insurance industry is to address liability challenge and the forging of documents by the involved parties, i.e., insurance company or the users, in order to increase financial gain. Conventional methods to address this challenge is significantly time consuming and costly and also suffers from lock of transparency. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution for the insurance industry in smart cities (BIS). BIS creates a big umbrella that consists of the smart city managers, insurance companies, users, and sensors and devices. The users are known by changeable Public Keys (PKs) that introduces a level of anonymity. The data collected by the sensors is stored in cloud or local storage and is shared with insurance company on demand to find the liable party that in turn increases the privacy of the users. BIS enables the users to prove and share the history of their insurances with other users or insurances. Using Proof of Concept (POC) implementation we demonstrated the applicability of blockchain in insurance industry. The implementation results prove that BIS significantly reduces delay involved in insurance industry as compared with conventional insurance methods.
Permissioned blockchain such as Hyperledger fabric enables a secure supply chain model in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) through multichannel and private data collection mechanisms. Sharing of Industrial data including private data exchange at every stage between supply chain partners helps to improve product quality, enable future forecast, and enhance management activities. However, the existing data sharing and querying mechanism in Hyperledger fabric is not suitable for supply chain environment in IIoT because the queries are evaluated on actual data stored on ledger which consists of sensitive information such as business secrets, and special discounts offered to retailers and individuals. To solve this problem, we propose a differential privacy-based permissioned blockchain using Hyperledger fabric to enable private data sharing in supply chain in IIoT (DH-IIoT). We integrate differential privacy into the chaindcode (smart contract) of Hyperledger fabric to achieve privacy preservation. As a result, the query response consists of perturbed data which protects the sensitive information in the ledger. The proposed work (DH-IIoT) is evaluated by simulating a permissioned blockchain using Hyperledger fabric. We compare our differential privacy integrated chaincode of Hyperledger fabric with the default chaincode setting of Hyperledger fabric for supply chain scenario. The results confirm that the proposed work maintains 96.15% of accuracy in the shared data while guarantees the protection of sensitive ledgers data.
Security and privacy in Direct Load Control (DLC) is a fundamental challenge in smart grids. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based framework to increase security and privacy of DLC. We propose a method whereby participating nodes share their data with the distribution company in an anonymous and secure manner. To reduce the associated overhead for data dissemination, we propose a hash-based transaction generation method. We also outline the DLC process for managing the load in consumer site. Qualitative analysis demonstrates the security and privacy of the proposed method.