Jun 1, 2019·2019 IEEE International Conference on Environment and Electrical Engineering and 2019 IEEE Industrial and Commercial Power Systems Europe (EEEIC / I&CPS Europe)
Christos Patsonakis, Sofia Terzi, Ioannis Moschos, Dimosthenis Ioannidis · 6 authors
The advancement and penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and renewable energy sources (RES) are transforming legacy energy systems in an attempt to reduce carbon emissions and energy waste. Demand Response (DR) has been identified as a key enabler of integrating these, and other, Smart Grid technologies, while, simultaneously, ensuring grid stability and secure energy supply. The massive deployment of smart meters, IoT devices and DERs dictate the need to move to decentralized, or even localized, DR schemes in the face of the increased scale and complexity of monitoring and coordinating the actors and devices in modern smart grids. Furthermore, there is an inherent need to guarantee interoperability, due to the vast number of, e.g., hardware and software stakeholders, and, more importantly, promote trust and incentivize the participation of customers in DR schemes, if they are to be successfully deployed.In this work, we illustrate the design of an energy system that addresses all of the roadblocks that hinder the large scale deployment of DR services. Our DR framework incorporates modern Smart Grid technologies, such as fog-enabled and IoT devices, DERs and RES to, among others, automate asset handling and various time-consuming workflows. To guarantee interoperability, our system employs OpenADR, which standardizes the communication of DR signals among energy stakeholders. Our approach acknowledges the need for decentralization and employs blockchains and smart contracts to deliver a secure, privacy-preserving, tamper-resistant, auditable and reliable DR framework. Blockchains provide the infrastructure to design innovative DR schemes and incentivize active consumer participation as their aforementioned properties promote transparency and trust. In addition, we harness the power of smart contracts which allows us to design and implement fully automated contractual agreements both among involved stakeholders, as well as on a machine-to-machine basis. Smart contracts are digital agents that "live" in the blockchain and can encode, execute and enforce arbitrary agreements. To illustrate the potential and effectiveness of our smart contract-based DR framework, we present a case study that describes the exchange of DR signals and the autonomous instantiation of smart contracts among involved participants to mediate and monitor transactions, enforce contractual clauses, regulate energy supply and handle payments/penalties.
With the power system reform and the increase of distributed energy penetration, effective dispatch of distributed energy faces opportunities and challenges. Traditionally, the centralized power transaction mode has high maintenance cost, low efficiency and untimely settlement. Therefore, it is hard to adapt to the high-frequency and small-scale distributed energy trading scenarios. To this end, this paper mainly proposes a distributed power trading method based on blockchain considering security constraints. The paper first reviews the development history of blockchain technology, and explores the theory of blockchain technology. At the same time, it combines the analysis of distributed energy features and summarizes some requirements for building a distributed energy trading market. Then the mechanism and model of distributed power trading considering security constraints are constructed. Finally, a distributed power trading method based on blockchain is proposed to ensure the transparency of transactions, and to provide smart contracts for distributed power multilateral transactions. Through the example of the Ethereum blockchain, the distributed power trading method based on blockchain proposed in this paper can realize the over-limit correction of power flow and the multilateral trading of power, and realize the digital management of electric energy.
Jun 1, 2019·2019 IEEE International Conference on Environment and Electrical Engineering and 2019 IEEE Industrial and Commercial Power Systems Europe (EEEIC / I&CPS Europe)
Maria Luisa Di Silvestre, Pierluigi Gallo, Eleonora Riva Sanseverino, Giuseppe Sciumè · 5 authors
The present paper shows the possibility to use a smart contract for defining a distributed Demand Response mechanism. The use of the blockchain and smart contracts for the Demand Response mechanism allows the creation of an automatic system, where network users can communicate with the DSO to provide their flexibility. The blockchain ensures that the same information is shared among the users of the grid, while preserving user privacy. The DSO notifies the request to increase or reduce the load in a given period of the day using channels, a native abstraction of Hyperledger Fabric. The smart contract computes the support provided by each user to fulfill the requested load adaptation and automatically remunerates users proportionally to their contribution.The first step is to record the energy consumptions of the users in order to evaluate the own daily baseline. Finished this phase, the Demand Response smart contract can start.The blockchain platform used for this application is Hyperledger Fabric since it turned to be flexible for smart contracts implementation and supports multi-tenancy. Results show the possibility to successfully apply the blockchain technology to this particular topic, even considering privacy preserving issues.
Power systems are experiencing evolutionary changes. Future grids will be smarter and with a higher level of autonomy. In addition, the penetration of demand-side small-scale distributed generation is mounting. The proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs) conveys a promising and brilliant future for this technology, particularly for vehicles with V2G capability, that will result in a boom in the pervasiveness of EVs in the next decades. Digitalization and modernization of power systems, as well as ever-growing technological advances in information and communications technology (ICT) and the internet of things (IoT), will procure a smart platform that facilitates peer-to-peer (P2P) communication of power systems’ elements. Thus, future power systems will be immensely complicated and interconnected in terms of data transfer and data processing. Hence, in addition to the employment of big data techniques, some structural changes are required to deal with such a massive body of data. Therefore, the security of data must be ensured specifically for financial transactions. Furthermore, in the future grids, millions of microsources will sell their generating power to the local loads in demand-side, and a load may be served by several microsources. Furthermore, flexible loads can use this platform to trade interchangeably with inelastic loads or the main grid. In this respect, myriad transactions must be recorded, which cannot be handled with the current banking system. This matter necessitates the deployment of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies for handling these microtransactions without needing to supervisory and authority. Hence, a proper platform is indispensable to connect the vendors and purchasers easily and executes the transaction after authentication, validation, and verification of both sides. This study delves into the necessity of employment of blockchain in power systems. Besides, the conceptual background of blockchain and cryptocurrency are explained.
This paper presents the actual measured site data obtained from an operational cryptocurrency mining site. A comparative analysis is then presented to demonstrate the consistency between previously reported test data and operational behaviors of cryptocurrency mine sites. The analysis includes simulation results which utilize the previously observed harmonic spectrum to determine expected distortion levels as a consequence of cryptocurrency mining loads. The effects of the cryptocurrency mining loads are then quantified through comparison to standards indicated in IEEE Std. 519.
Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy · 6 authors
Smart contracts are programs running on a blockchain. They are immutable to change, and hence can not be patched for bugs once deployed. Thus it is critical to ensure they are bug-free and well-designed before deployment. A Contract defect is an error, flaw or fault in a smart contract that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways. The detection of contract defects is a method to avoid potential bugs and improve the design of existing code. Since smart contracts contain numerous distinctive features, such as the gas system. decentralized, it is important to find smart contract specified defects. To fill this gap, we collected smart-contract-related posts from Ethereum StackExchange, as well as real-world smart contracts. We manually analyzed these posts and contracts; using them to define 20 kinds of contract defects. We categorized them into indicating potential security, availability, performance, maintainability and reusability problems. To validate if practitioners consider these contract as harmful, we created an online survey and received 138 responses from 32 different countries. Feedback showed these contract defects are harmful and removing them would improve the quality and robustness of smart contracts. We manually identified our defined contract defects in 587 real world smart contract and publicly released our dataset. Finally, we summarized 5 impacts caused by contract defects. These help developers better understand the symptoms of the defects and removal priority.
Blockchain networks have enjoyed remarkable attention the past few years in both the research community and the society at large. Such networks carry the promise of highly decentralized validation and witnessing of important social and economic events, reducing the need to rely on centralized authorities. Public proof-of-work based networks specifically, despite their limitations and challenges, continue to be popular due to their simplicity and intuitiveness. However, for such networks to perpetually meet viability, efficiency, security and environmental sustainability objectives, they need to adapt to environmental changes via continuous reconfiguration of their operating parameters. In this paper, we attempt to formulate this blockchain network adaptability problem as one of control engineering. We sketch the basic characteristics of blockchain networks as systems and identify variables available for designing a controller that allows such networks to attain macroscopic operating objectives. By means of describing and simulating a simple idealized proportional controller, we demonstrate the benefits and some of the challenges in designing such controllers.
Smart grid (SG) provides a peer-to-peer energy trading mechanism wherein the electric vehicles (EVs) can trade for energy with their peers using the information and communication technologies. However, the dependence on third party for coordinating the energy trading decisions leads to a bottleneck for any distributed environment. Therefore, blockchain technology can provide a privacy-preserving and effective consensus mechanism without the control of trusted third party. Although blockchain provides inherent secure framework for transactional process, but the this security is because of computational complexity enforced. In SG environment, the conventional blockchain process could not be employed due to limited computational resources with EVs, which makes it difficult to solve the tough computational puzzles to validate the transactions. On the other hand, any compromise on the computation difficulty makes it more vulnerable to various types of attacks. Therefore, in this paper, SmartChain: a blockchain inspired smart and scalable ledger framework which does not require much computational complexity is designed for secure peer-to-peer energy trading in SG ecosystem. The proposed framework is evaluated using the parameters such as execution and validation time. The results obtained depict the superiority of SmartChain in contrast to the conventional blockchain process.
A fast, reliable and intelligent energy transaction pattern between energy suppliers and consumers is expected to be established within the scope of energy Internet (EI). Corresponding to the transaction principle, a smart contract-based energy trading strategy is proposed in this paper. This paper focuses on shifting the demand of residential users to reduce the energy cost. Then, a demand response model is given. Finally, the simulation result demonstrates the validity of the proposed demand response strategy.
Multimicrogrid (MMG) systems have the potential to play an increasingly important role in the transformation of existing power grid to smart grid. However, the open and distributed connectivity of MMGs exposes the systems into various cyber-attacks, which may cause serious failures or physical damages, such as power supply interruption and human casualties. Therefore, ensuring the security of MMGs is of paramount importance. To address this issue, a new collaborative intrusion detection (CID) approach using blockchain is proposed in this paper for MMG systems in smart grid. Due to the consensus mechanism of blockchain, the approach is designed without the need of a trusted authority or central server while improving the accuracy of intrusion detection in a collaborative way. It is equipped with a proposal generation method that combines periodic and trigger patterns to generate the detection target of CID, i.e., a proposal. From the generated proposals together with the correlation model of MMGs, a CID is achieved by using the consensus mechanism. The final detection results of CID are stored on blockchain in sequence. The use of an incentive mechanism motivates a single microgrid to participate in consensus. The effectiveness of the presented approach is demonstrated through a case study on an MMG system.
This paper deals with the design of the secure network in an Enhanced Internet of Vehicles by using the Blockchain Governance Game (BGG). The BGG is a system model of a stochastic game to find best strategies towards preparation of preventing a network malfunction by an attacker and the paper applies this game model into the connected vehicle security. Analytically tractable results for decision-making parameters enable to predict the moment for safety operations and to deliver the optimal combination of the number of reserved nodes with the acceptance probability of backup nodes to protect a connected car. This research helps for whom considers the enhanced secure IoV architecture with the BGG within a decentralized network.
Capable of aggregating multiple energy resources, the energy service company (ESCO) has been regarded as a promising alternative for improving power system flexibility and facilitate the consumption of renewable resources in the energy market. However, the issues have become significantly more serious related to the privacy and security of the data in consumption and trading. In this paper, we address the problem by proposing a privacy-preserving energy scheduling (PPES) model based on energy blockchain network. A Lagrangian relaxation method is applied to decompose the model into several individual optimal scheduling problems, and the individual scheduling problems are solved by consensus algorithm and smart contracts in energy blockchain network. The performance of the proposed model and method is evaluated with several case studies based on multiple energy nodes. Simulation results show the rationality and validity of the proposed method, and the model is conducive to the protection of environment and transparent scheduling of energy service companies (ESCOs). In addition, it can reflect the information of energy demand and supply to improve the privacy and security of data.
In this paper, we propose a secure system design for implementing the minimal-information exchange framework to efficiently provide services; the application of this concept is in the context of electricity services. The information being exchanged is dictated by the Dynamic Monitoring and Decision Systems (DyMonDS) platform, which enables optimal global solutions to be derived even in a largely distributed setting. This capability parallels the increasing number of smart Internet of Things (IoT) devices that allow for a responsive and flexible service. These advancements are aligned in the Secure Blockchain-Enabled DyMonDS design, where a secure communication protocol enables smart embedded devices to communicate with local compute nodes; these compute nodes are connected in a meshed blockchain network, providing information security, integrity, and robustness.
Sahil Garg, Kuljeet Kaur, Georges Kaddoum, François Gagnon · 5 authors
Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) networks have emerged as a new technology in modern electric power transmission networks. It allows bi-directional flow of communication and electricity between electric vehicles (EVs) and the Smart Grid (SG), in order to provide more sophisticated energy trading. However, due to the involvement of a huge amount of trading data and the presence of untrusted entities in the visiting networks, the underlying V2G infrastructure suffers from various security and privacy challenges. Although, several solutions have been proposed in the literature to address these problems, issues like lack of mutual authentication and anonymity, incapability to protect against several attack vectors, generation of huge overhead, and dependency on centralized infrastructures make security and privacy issues even more challenging. To address the above mentioned problems, in this paper, we propose a blockchain oriented hierarchical authentication mechanism for rewarding EVs. The overall process is broadly classified into the following phases: 1) System Initialization, 2) Registration, 3) Hierarchical Mutual Authentication, and 4) Consensus; wherein blockchain's distributed ledger has been employed for transaction execution in distributed V2G environments while Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has been used for hierarchical authentication. The designed hierarchical authentication mechanism has been employed to preserve the anonymity of EVs and support mutual authentication between EVs, charging stations (CSs) and the central aggregator (CAG). Additionally, it also supports minimal communicational and computational overheads on resource constrained EVs. Further, formal security verification of the proposed scheme on widely accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool validates its safeness against different security attacks.
Blockchain technique, with the novelties of decentralization, smart contract, security and cooperative autonomy, is expected to play great effects on promoting the development of energy local networks (ELNs). This paper presents an automated demand response (ADR) framework for decentralized scheduling and secure peer-to-peer (P2P) trading among energy storage systems in ELNs. Different from most existing works that trade electricity over long distances and through complex meshes, this proposed work performs decentralized and automated demand response through energy sharing of P2P executors. We explore for the first time the benefits of a promising blockchain to conduct the overall ADR framework and increase the P2P trading security. To achieve decentralized scheduling without relying on a central entity, a price-incentive noncooperative game theoretic model is introduced to produce equilibrium solutions for energy storage systems. Moreover, we develop a schedulable ability evaluation system to match trading pairs involving buying and selling nodes. On this basis, a state-machine-driven smart contract mechanism is built to realize P2P trading without reliance on a trusted third party. To illustrate the implementation details of the ADR method, a distributed algorithm is designed. Case studies are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Morteza Dabbaghjamanesh, Boyu Wang, Shahab Mehraeen, Jie Zhang · 5 authors
This paper proposes a novel framework for privacy and security enhancement of power trading in the networked microgrids (MGs) based on the blockchain-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) approach. Utilizing the blockchain-enabled IoT technology in the power trading of the network MGs can potentially lead to some significant advantages such as fewer system risks, mitigate financial fraud, and less the operational cost. A newly stochastic framework based on the unscented transform (UT) is employed to model the uncertainties of renewable energy resources and hourly load demand. Consequently, the proposed framework is tested on the network MG containing residential MG (as a non-crucial load), commercial MG (as an intermediate level load), and hospital MG (as a crucial load), to validate the effectiveness and high performance of the proposed technique.
Benedikt Kirpes, Esther Mengelkamp, Georg Schaal, Christof Weinhardt
Abstract In this paper, we propose a model-based system architecture for an interoperable blockchain-based local energy market for prosumers in a residential microgrid setting. Based on the Smart Grid Architecture Model our analysis deduced 21 organizational, informational, technical and blockchain requirements for a local energy market and its underlying information system. These are evaluated in the Landau Microgrid case study. We derive, that a clear value proposition for the key stakeholders, standardization of data exchange and communication, and a suitable physical implementation are the major challenges.
Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a consolidated reality. Smart homes are equipped with a growing number of IoT devices that capture more and more information about human beings lives. However, manufacturers paid little or no attention to security, so that various challenges are still in place. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to secure IoT systems that combines the concept of Security-by-Contract (S×C) with the Fog computing distributed paradigm. We define the pillars of our approach, namely the notions of IoT device contract, Fog node policy and contract-policy matching, the respective life-cycles, and the resulting S×C workflow. To better understand all the concepts of the S×C framework, and highlight its practical feasibility, we use a running case study based on a context-aware system deployed in a real smart home.
Abdullah Bin Masood, Hassaan Khaliq Qureshi, Syed Muhammad Danish, Marios Lestas
Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) comprise of a network of physically distributed embedded sensors and actuators equipped with computational and communication capability. In CPS, Internet of Things (IoT) devices communicate in a trustless environment as the data can be compromised due to the centralized database, limited power and computational constraints. At the same time, reliability and resiliency are key concerns in CPS in the face of unforeseen circumstances, often emanating from disaster based failures. In this paper, critical issues of centralized database security in CPS are addressed via a distributed blockchain based solution. The proposed system encompasses a smart contract based framework in Ethereum blockchain. It further explores the potential of blockchain in securing and offering a distributed network for the CPS in a closed loop manner. To demonstrate the realizability of the proposed framework, a testbed implementation for the proposed idea is provided. A desktop computer, a laptop, a simple temperature sensor and a Light Emitting Diode (LED) are interfaced in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network using Ethereum. The speedy transaction of sensor data in the blockchain at various difficulty levels and actuation through smart contracts enhance the usability of the platform for CPS and various IoT applications.
V. Kamuni, U. Asfia, Sarang Sutavani, A. Sheikh · 5 authors
In the recent trend of smart grids, most of the systems are interconnected with cyber systems which lead to various security and adversary issues. To protect the systems from serious threats of cyber-attacks, one of the solutions is to exclude a central authority by making the system decentralized. This issue of the system security can be addressed using blockchain which is a distributed ledger storing data securely via cryptography. In the proposed framework, i.e. the inclusion of smart contract in blockchain for energy trading between Electric Vehicles (EV) and Charging Stations (CS) eliminates the need of an intermediary which minimizes the misleading of information between both the parties and enhances the security and privacy of the system. The cost of charging is calculated and validated by smart contracts via consensus of the CSs. If the EVs have multiple options to choose a particular CS, then the one proposing minimum charging cost is chosen. Furthermore, cost and other details are stored in blockchain in the form of blocks via consensus, which are connected cryptographically to the previous blocks, thus data is immutable and secured.
Eric Zanghi, Milton Brown Do Coutto Filho, Julio Cesar Stacchini de Souza
The smart grid environment requires the enhancement of various computational tools, especially for routine tasks of data acquisition and system monitoring. This paper presents the building blocks of a conceptual framework to be used as the basis for the construction of novel distributed remote mete ring systems with utilization of the cutting edge Blockchain technology. The proposed methodology is suitable for processing a large volume of data aimed at monitoring modern electric power distribution grids. As a proof of concept, a collaborative metering system is conceived based on the Blockchain technology, being primarily capable of: dealing with the entirety of the collected data (conveniently stored and filtered); assuring data integrity by means of cryptography; optimizing implementation/operation costs of the telecommunication services involved. Simulation results concerning the reliability and performance of the designed distributed remote metering system are presented.
Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the run-time environment for smart contracts and its vulnerabilities may lead to serious problems to the Ethereum ecology. With lots of techniques being developed for the validation of smart contracts, the security problems of EVM have not been well-studied. In this paper, we propose EVMFuzz, aiming to detect vulnerabilities of EVMs with differential fuzz testing. The core idea of EVMFuzz is to continuously generate seed contracts for different EVMs' execution, so as to find as many inconsistencies among execution results as possible, eventually discover vulnerabilities with output cross-referencing. First, we present the evaluation metric for the internal inconsistency indicator, such as the opcode sequence executed and gas used. Then, we construct seed contracts via a set of predefined mutators and employ dynamic priority scheduling algorithm to guide seed contracts selection and maximize the inconsistency. Finally, we leverage different EVMs as crossreferencing oracles to avoid manual checking of the execution output. For evaluation, we conducted large-scale mutation on 36,295 real-world smart contracts and generated 253,153 smart contracts. Among them, 66.2% showed differential performance, including 1,596 variant contracts triggered inconsistent output among EVMs. Accompanied by manual root cause analysis, we found 5 previously unknown security bugs in four widely used EVMs, and all had been included in Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database.