Flexible regulation of smart grid is vital for grid operation. This paper proposes a smart grid data aggregation and regulation mechanism based on consortium blockchain, and its signcryption algorithm can be applied to multidimensional data acquisition and multiple receivers in the consortium blockchain. In the process of regulation, the control center, the grid operator, and the equipment supplier receive fixed-height blocks from the blockchain and obtain plaintext from the decryption. Each receiver analyzes the multidimensional data and formulates corresponding control policies for individual users. Grid operators implement user power regulation by feedback on smart contracts. The security analysis and performance comparison show that the proposed scheme has advantages in computing and communication costs while meeting security requirements for confidentiality and data integrity.
Tianlu Gao, Wei Gao, Jun Jason Zhang, Wenzhong David Gao
With the installed capacities of Distributed Generations (DGs) dramatically increasing in power systems from Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) such as hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal and biomass, the operation methods of DERs tradings or transactions become more and more complicated. However, the energy market of DERs in Microgrids (MGs) is still under devolvement due to low security and transparency at present. Therefore, a small-scale microgrid energy market is proposed in this study based on Decentralized Autonomous Organization of Parallel, Integrity, Longevity, and Transparency (PILT-DAO) of the features of the blockchain. The microgrid owners can complete the transaction in the PILT-DAO market. In order to implement this energy trading platform, the first step is to simulate a modified distributed IEEE 13 node test feeders system. The next step is to develop a price mechanism method based on a consensus + innovation distributed algorithm to calculate the distributed Distribution Locational Marginal Price (DLMP). At the meantime, smart meters record the Power Flow (PF) data of each DG as one node of the whole simulated distributed power system and send them to blockchain including distributed price and power generation data. The third step is to constitute a decentralized autonomous market by programming smart contracts in Ethereum DAO, running in an artificial system parallelly. A case study of a small-scale microgrid energy market based on PILT-DAO is illustrated followed by the conclusion.
Ioannis Karagiannis, Konstantinos Mavrogiannis, John Soldatos, Dimitris Drakoulis · 6 authors
Recent security incidents in the finance sector have demonstrated the importance of sharing security information across financial institutions, as a means of mitigating risks and boosting the early preparedness against relevant attacks. However, financial institutions are in several cases reluctant to share security information beyond what is imposed by applicable regulations. In this paper, we introduce a blockchain-based solution for sharing security information in a decentralized way, which boosts security and trust in the information sharing process. We also illustrate how the information that is shared across financial institutions can serve as a basis for collaborative security services such as risk assessment.
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability Analysis
DLT has become an important topic of the world in recent years. Today Distributed Ledger Technology is growing famous among transactions and storing data between organizations. It has given an economic boom to many businesses and industries. DL technology brings a revolutionary change in maintaining secure transactions and storing data on a network of machines. The data stored use crypto technology to make it secure. Although this technology brings a revolutionary change and more convenient services, the security issues of crypto technology is also a very important discussion which we need to concern. This paper discusses the security threats, deficiencies and weaknesses of Crypto Technology. Security issues is discussed which might occurred in systems, networks, transaction etc.
The drawbacks of the current centralized energy market render it necessary that a decentralized architecture - consisting of entities such as microgrids, utility companies, financial institutions, and consumers- is developed. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) provide an immutable, tamper-proof and secure way of automating and recording complex transactions. They can be used in conjunction with smart energy meters to create collaborative economy business models in energy, thus, energy production and consumption measurements can be authenticated in a secure way and the optimal balance between supply, demand and their pricing can be achieved. Moreover, the decentralized structure of blockchain enables business processes to become automated via smart contracts and decentralized applications, contributing to a viable energy market. This study attempts to technically evaluate different startup approaches in the Decentralized Energy Internet domain, review their current progress in engineering, security, regulatory and societal aspects, and examine their future challenges and the potential of using a Unified and Adaptable Model.
Ethereum smart contracts are programs that can be collectively executed by a network of mutually untrusted nodes. Smart contracts handle and transfer assets of values, offering strong incentives for malicious attacks. Intrusion attacks are a popular type of malicious attacks. In this article, we propose ContractGuard, the first intrusion detection system (IDS) to defend Ethereum smart contracts against such attacks. Like IDSs for conventional programs, ContractGuard detects intrusion attempts as abnormal control flow. However, existing IDS techniques/tools are inapplicable to Ethereum smart contracts due to Ethereum's decentralized nature and its highly restrictive execution environment. To address these issues, we design ContractGuard by embedding it in the contracts to profile context-tagged acyclic paths, and optimizing it under the Ethereum gas-oriented performance model. The main goal is to minimize the overheads, to which the users will be extremely sensitive since the cost needs to be paid upfront in digital concurrency. Empirical investigation using real-life contracts deployed in the Ethereum mainnet shows that on average, ContractGuard only adds to 36.14 percent of the deployment overhead and 28.27 percent of the runtime overhead. Furthermore, we conducted controlled experiments and show that ContractGuard successfully guard against attacks on all real-world vulnerabilities and 83 percent of the seeded vulnerabilities.
Lehlogonolo P. I. Ledwaba, Gerhard P. Hancke, Sherrin J. Isaac, Hein S. Venter
The ability for the smart microgrid to allow for the independent generation and distribution of electrical energy makes it an attractive solution towards enabling universal access to electricity within developing economies. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are being considered as an enabling technology for the secure energy trade market however the high processing, energy and data exchange requirements may make them unsuitable for the Industrial Internet of Things technologies used in the implementation of the microgrid and the limited connectivity infrastructure in developing technologies. This work serves to assess the suitability of DLTs for IIoT edge node operation and as a solution for the microgrid energy market by considering node transaction times, operating temperature, power consumption, processor and memory useage, in addition to mining effort and end user costs.
Modern power systems face different challenges such as the ever-increasing electrical energy demand, the massive growth of renewable energy with distributed generations, the large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) devices adaptation, the emerging cyber-physical security threats, and the main goal of maintaining the system's stability and reliability. These challenges pose extreme pressure on finding advanced technologies and sustainable solutions for secure and reliable operations of the power system. The blockchain is one of the recent technologies that have gained lots of attention in different applications including smart grid for its uniqueness and decentralized nature. In the last few years, this technology grew a momentum specifically with the cryptocurrencies' industry such as the Bitcoin and Etherium. The Blockchain's applications in the smart grids could offer many innovative and affordable solutions to some of the challenges that the future and the current smart grids will be facing. This paper reviews different prospects, advantages, approaches, and technical challenges of utilizing the blockchain technology in the smart grid, and presents frameworks for key smart grid blockchain-based applications; more specifically, it is shown that how the blockchain can be used as the smart grid's cyber-physical layer.
Ali Dorri, Ambrose Hill, Salil S. Kanhere, Raja Jurdak · 6 authors
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 SPB's applicability for energy trading. We benchmark SPB's 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.
The rapid rise of local and community based renewable energy generation, combined with the rollout of smart meters, breakthroughs in IT, and electricity grid congestion is bringing about radically new collaborative economy business models in energy. In response, people are beginning to trade energy locally. Distributed ledger (blockchain) technologies are used to authenticate and track ownership of energy production, consumption, and demand-side response ensuring each unit of energy is securely and transparently accounted for. This project will help lay the groundwork for such systems in the UK – analysing the regulatory, security, engineering and societal requirements for their acceptability.
Byung-Wan Jo, Rana Muhammad Asad Khan, Yun‐Sung Lee
The Internet-of-things (IoT) and blockchain are growing realities of modern society, and both are rapidly transforming civilization, either separately or in combination. However, the leverage of both technologies for structural health monitoring (SHM) to enable transparent information sharing among involved parties and autonomous decision making has not yet been achieved. Therefore, this study combines IoT with blockchain-based smart contracts for SHM of underground structures to define a novel, efficient, scalable, and secure distributed network for enhancing operational safety. In this blockchain-IoT network, the characteristics of locally centralized and globally decentralized distribution have been activated by dividing them into core and edge networks. This division enhances the efficiency and scalability of the system. The proposed system was effective in simulation for autonomous monitoring and control of structures. After proper design, the decentralized blockchain networks may effectively be deployed for transparent and efficient information sharing, smart contracts-based autonomous decision making, and data security in SHM.
Smart Grids is an emerging technology promising significant changes in the economy and the social sphere. One among many challenges in their development and distribution is security. Considering recent hackers attacks on energy grids and taking into account the distributed structure of these systems the use of traditional means of computer protection and the search for a crime figure becomes more difficult or impossible. In this article, we introduce some application areas of smart grid forensic science, discuss the opportunities, and outline the open issues in the topic. We summarized challenges for forensic in Smart Grids in connection with a Blockchain and proposed a decentralized transaction platform based on Blockchain tailored to the energy sector with all the latest technology such as advanced metering infrastructure, distributed generation, etc.
In this paper, we report our project Fuse, which is a fuzz testing service. It presents the Fuse architecture, and discusses the progress and technical issues to be addressed to fuzz-test smart contracts and support fuzz-testing of Dapps.
Energy storage units (ESUs) enable several attractive features of modern smart grids such as enhanced grid resilience, effective demand response, and reduced bills. However, uncoordinated charging of ESUs stresses the power system and can lead to a blackout. On the other hand, existing charging coordination mechanisms suffer from several limitations. First, the need for a central charging coordinator (CC) presents a single point of failure that jeopardizes the effectiveness of the charging coordination. Second, a transparent charging coordination mechanism does not exist where users are not aware whether the CC is honest or not in coordination charging requests among them in a fair way. Third, existing mechanisms overlook the privacy concerns of the involved customers. To address these limitations, in this paper, we leverage the blockchain and smart contracts to build a decentralized charging coordination mechanism without the need for a centralized charging coordinator. First ESUs should use tokens for anonymously authenticate themselves to the blockchain. Then each ESU sends a charging request that contains its State-of-Charge (SoC), Time-to-complete-charge (TCC) and amount of required charging to the smart contract address on the blockchain. The smart contract will then run the charging coordination mechanism in a self-executed manner such that ESUs with the highest priorities are charged in the present time slot while charging requests of lower priority ESUs are deferred to future time slots. In this way, each ESU can make sure that charging schedules are computed correctly. Finally, we have implemented the proposed mechanism on the Ethereum test-bed blockchain, and our analysis shows that execution cost can be acceptable in terms of gas consumption while enabling decentralized charging coordination with increased transparency, reliability, and privacy preserving.
Energy storage units (ESUs) enable several attractive features of modern smart grids such as enhanced grid resilience, effective demand response, and reduced bills. However, uncoordinated charging of ESUs stresses the power system and can lead to mass blackout. On the other hand, existing charging coordination mechanisms suffer from several limitations. First, the need for a central charging controller (CC) presents a single point of failure that jeopardizes the effectiveness of the charging coordination. Second, existing mechanisms overlook privacy concerns of the involved customers. To address these limitations, in this paper, we leverage the blockchain and smart contracts to build a decentralized charging coordination mechanism without the need for centralized charging coordinator. After each ESU sends a charging request to the smart contract address on the blockchain, the smart contract will run the charging coordination mechanism in a self-executed manner such that ESUs with the highest priority are charged in the present time slot while charging requests of lower priority ESUs are deferred to future time slots. We have implemented the proposed mechanism on the Ethereum blockchain and our analysis shows that the blockchain enables a decentralized charging coordination with increased transparency, reliability, and privacy preservation.
Luigi D’Oriano, Giuseppe Mastandrea, Giuseppe Rana, Giuseppe Raveduto · 7 authors
With the diffusion of smart metering devices and the increasing trend in renewable energy investment [1], the electrical grids are rapidly changing towards the adoption of decentralized energy networks in which consumers can be also producers (i.e. prosumers). The increased use of renewable and distributed generation is leading the development of Smart Grid and microgrid technologies. In this context new business opportunities can be developed provided that new critical issues for the traditional operators, introduced by decentralization, are addressed properly. As example, grid imbalances can generate Reverse Power Flow (RPF) that is harmful for the equipment since many of the protection and control devices are designed with the assumption that power always flows in one direction. In this paper, we present results from the ongoing project eDREAM (enabling new Demand REsponse Advanced, Market oriented and Secure technologies, solutions and business models) with some extent on requirements and use cases related a decentralized flexibility system based on ledger technologies.
George Suciu, Carmen Nădrag, Cristiana Istrate, Alexandru Vulpe · 6 authors
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) refers to a digital method for registering virtual transactions and other similar data in multiple locations simultaneously. The main characteristic of distributed ledgers is that they do not have a central administration component, due to advanced algorithms and methods used for record-keeping. Thus, transactions are faster and reasonable, as they do not require a central authority to validate them. The network is formed by multiple nodes through which the participant can access recordings, making the network become less vulnerable when referring to cyberattacks. After several years of technological development in this area, different distributed ledger technologies are available. This article presents Blockchain and Tangle technologies along with their main characteristics, in order to make an extended comparison of their approaches. In addition to this, the paper contains experimentation details and results for each technology presented.
The state parameters of electrical equipment and power system control parameters are the key data to realize the precise control and cooperative autonomy of a cyber physical power system. The trustworthiness of the data is the primary condition to guarantee the electric power system’s safe and reliable operation. In the traditional centralized data acquisition and management architecture, the security and trustworthiness completely depend on the central main server. A small mistake in the main server will result in data loss, which is irreversible and fatal. Blockchain technique combines the dispersed data with mutual backup and retrieval mechanism, which guarantees that the data cannot be tampered with and forged privately. Based on the blockchain technology, this article proposes a novel data trustworthy acquisition model with high credibility, applied to a self-organized cyber physical power system. In order to overcome the long time-consuming process of building traditional blockchains, a new on-demand data transmission routing algorithm with M/M/1/k queuing model is proposed in this article. Different scales of IEEE standard bus systems are employed as experimental examples to evaluate the algorithm’s performance. The results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively shorten the time consumption of blockchain construction and realize the data trustworthiness of cyber physical power system.
The robustness of modern power systems depends on the level of cyber security against cyber-attacks. Since energy transactions could significantly affect the power system operation, these transactions should be evaluated through a secure system to enhance the power system reliability. In this paper, a blockchain-based energy transaction framework is introduced and the level of security for different energy transaction frameworks are evaluated by calculating the overall probability of successful attacks (PSA)to each one. PSA is defined as a successful attack to the system which can lead to the system collapse. The numerical results will demonstrate that the blockchain based energy transaction framework is the most reliable system against cyber-attacks comparing with traditional centralized and modified decentralized energy transaction frameworks.
As an important part of the smart grid, the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) can provide various auxiliary services for the power grid and promote the use of renewable resources. However, there are various kinds of attacks in the V2G network. Based on consortium blockchain, this paper proposes a cross-domain authentication scheme for the security threat in the V2G network. This paper designs the trust model and the system architecture, and describes the scheme in detail. The signature and authentication of the scheme adopt the SM9 identity-based cryptographic algorithm. This scheme utilizes the fact that block chain technology is not easy to tamper with. It uses a hash algorithm to verify the certificate, reducing the number of public key algorithm signatures and verifications, making the solution efficient and scalable. The introduction of block chain technology provides new ideas and methods for solving the security problems in the Smart Grid.
Pietro Danzi, Sarah Hambridge, Čedomir Stefanović, Petar Popovski
In the power grid, the Balance Responsible Parties (BRPs) purchase energy based on a forecast of the user consumption. The forecasts are imperfect, and the corrections of their real-time deviations are managed by a System Operator (SO), which charges the BRPs for the procured imbalances. Flexible consumers, associated with a BRP, can be involved in a demand response (DR) program to reduce the imbalance costs. However, running the DR program requires the BRP to invest resources in the infrastructure and increases its operating costs. To limit the intervention of BRP, we implement the DR via a blockchain smart contract. Moreover, to reduce the delay of publication of the imbalance price, caused by the inefficient accounting process of the current balancing markets, a second blockchain is adopted at the SO layer, procuring a fast and auditable credit settlements. The feasibility of the proposed architecture is evaluated over an Ethereum blockchain platform. The results show that block chains can enable a high automation of the balancing market, by providing (i) the implementation of aggregators with low operating cost and (ii) the timely and transparent access to the balancing information, thus fostering new business models for the BRPs.
To address the need for trusted information across bulk power systems, our paper proposes a new type of distributed ledger (or Blockchain), for a shared management of sensitive information in power systems. We call our Blockchain design the Assured Volt Ampere Information Ledger (AVAIL). The AVAIL` abstractions fit data needs of prototypical grid applications in wide area protection and control, energy management systems, and markets. The contribution of this paper is to draw directly from the distinct requirements of these applications and the valid assumptions about the adversaries, to shape the AVAIL abstractions. AVAIL is unique for the following features: 1) Adversarial model: Our design principles consider an adversarial model where attacks affect physical resources; 2) Non-binary validity: in our setting we allow for a spectrum of validity; 3) Validity enforcement: validity in our setting is governed by physical laws.