An access control architecture to services based on smart contracts and electric vehicle infrastructure management

Abstract

Advances in monitoring, sensing, control, and communication allow the use of Smart Grid. It enables smart metering applications, substation event and alarm updates, vehicle-tovehicle (V2V), and vehicle-to-network (V2G) energy transactions, among others. However, the data used is sensitive and communication between entities must be reliable and secure. For this, the Internet uses the Public Key Infrastructure (ICP) in which the communicating parties must have a digital certificate issued by a certification authority (CA). However, it has a centralized architecture with a single point of failure. An alternative to this is the use of distributed technologies and one that stands out is Blockchain. It is a technology that allows trusted communication between untrusted entities without a centralized third party. Also, Blockchain is a chronological sequence of blocks linked through the hash of each one. This characteristic ensures data integrity and immutability. Therefore, Blockchain is a powerful technology for recording data like access control rules. This work utilizes Blockchain to provide a framework applying the Smart Contract concept for a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) system. Also, it uses the framework Truffle to test the Smart Contract functionalities and presents a study case of the proposal (KIM et al., 2019) together with this work. In counterpart to the related works, this work does not have a single-point of failure.