Seung Min Kim, Tacklim Lee, Seunghwan Kim, Lee Won Park · 5 authors
The Smart Grid has emerged to address the shortcomings of one-way existing grid systems, and is the next generation power grid infrastructure that applies smart ICT (Information Communication Technology) to existing grid. The Smart Grid is expected to greatly improve the efficiency and reliability of future power systems with the demand for renewable energy resources. However, because major power facilities are interconnected through communication networks, Smart Grid’s cyber security is becoming an important issue. Cyber-attacks by malicious intruders can lead to serious incidents such as massive outages and the destruction of power network infrastructure, since the cyber-attacks can damage energy data, starting with personal information leakage from grid members. Therefore, as a solution to this issue we will suggest a secure smart energy management system based on the blockchain. The blockchain is a distributed data processing technology in which all users participating in the network distribute and store data. Applying blockchain technology to the Smart Grid will enable more secure management of energy data, and furthermore, it will contribute to the development of the future smart energy industry in the future.
Mario Pichler, Marcus Meisel, Andrija Goranović, Kurt Leonhartsberger · 9 authors
This paper provides a snapshot of the globally ongoing decentralization of (business) relations in the energy sector. This tendency can be observed in other domains as well and is accompanied by new digital technological developments. Blockchain technology is assigned disruptive potential when it comes to realize those decentralization ideas. This hype about Blockchain is mainly company-driven without a solid academic basis yet. The authors are currently involved in several research efforts for utilizing distributed energy resources like photovoltaic systems, batteries and electric cars for the setup of energy communities and marketplaces. The paper, therefore, presents detailed investigations of background and motivations for decentralization and the building of (local) energy communities and (peer-to-peer) marketplaces for sustainable utilization of renewable energies. An overview of recent related Blockchain-based works is presented, and the current state and feasibility for the realization of the envisioned decentralized solutions are discussed. In this way, the work aimed at contributing to a research-based decision foundation for upcoming Blockchain-based decentralization efforts.
Yuhong Li, Rahim Rahmani, Nicolas Fouassier, Peik Stenlund · 5 authors
Smart Grid represents an efficient power transmission, distribution and management system. However, solutions for Smart Grid have raised security and privacy problems. Moreover, with the introduction of renewable energy resources, such as rooftop solar panels and small biogas plants, more and more electricity consumers are involved in the energy generation system. This may cause the power system unstable and/or the waste of the energy. Blockchain is a promising technology for solving these problems in the future energy system on account of its distributed trust, anonymity, data integrity and availability. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-based architecture for Smart Grid. By using the proposed architecture, electricity consumers can be fully involved in the energy system and tracing the details of the energy they have consumed or generated. At the same time, the stability of the energy system can be kept, reducing the waste of the energy and potential hazard to the electrical equipment.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Low cost, high efficiency, price transparency, and timely settlement of transactions are required for direct transactions between electricity providers and consumers in the microgrids. So the blockchain technology and the continuous double auction mechanism for direct electricity trading have always been a hot topic in the field of microgrids.In order to further reduce the transaction cost of blockchain and increase the transaction efficiency, and to solve the problem of lack of privacy protection for continuous double auction in the existing scheme, a privacy protection scheme of microgrids direct electricity transaction based on consortium blockchain and the continuous double auction is proposed. In it, the combination of consortium blockchain technology and continuous double auction mechanism is applied to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of transactions. In the meanwhile, pseudonyms and pseudonym certificates are generated by fair blind signature technology to realize identity privacy in the continuous double auction. And decentralization and user identity traceability are achieved by using (t, n) threshold secret sharing technology which distributes and recovers the private key of a trusted third party. The theoretical security analysis shows that the privacy protection scheme has higher security. The simulation experiment shows that the consortium blockchain technology has lower cost and higher efficiency in this scheme.
The protection of smart meters (SMs) from cyberattacks is of utmost importance because SMs in advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) are physically unprotected and produce a large amount of sensitive data. Due to scalability, the SMs are small-sized and low-cost devices having low computational capabilities. The algorithms that are designed to complete the security requirements of SMs should be lightweight. To address this issue, this paper proposes a lightweight security solution to address the man-in-the-middle attack, data tempering, and blockchain-based data provenance. Received signal strength indicator (RSSI) is used to generate link fingerprints, which are used along with pseudo-random nonce to secure AMI. The proposed algorithm detects the involvement of adversarial node or meter tempering by computing other values along with 0 and 1 as the average of consecutive RSSI and difference between the RSSI of connected static SMs. Pearson correlation coefficient (ρ) of 0.9102 is achieved when no adversarial node is present in between the connected SMs having mobility in one or both SMs. Negative or approximately equal to zero values of ρ are computed when the adversary is present in the AMI or any of the SM in the AMI is forged. For blockchain-based data provenance, all the hash values of the packet header are 100% matched with the hash functions present at the data concentrator unit (DCU), which shows no adversary's involvement in AMI. For cases when the adversary is in the AMI, hash functions show no match with the hash values present at the DCU.
Open access
Electricity Theft Detection Techniques
Smart Grid Security and Resilience
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Micro and decentralized generation of electrical power is an emerging trend in the power industry. Blockchain technology allows decentralized and instant monetary and contractual transactions to occur over peer to peer private and public networks by satisfying cyber security concerns. Both changes have the potential to enable paradigm shift in the field of energy in the coming years. Decentralization in the energy business makes this sector a good playground for blockchain technology. As of now, energy applications of blockchain technology are in conceptual and early stage prototyping levels. This paper aims to present a comprehensive review of P2P energy trading related blockchain technology applications and proposes a comprehensive multi-layer energy model architecture for the peer to peer (P2P) energy trading implementations where the use of blockchain technology is integrated. P2P energy trading allows consumers to become prosumers of electricity in a more efficient, trustable, and profitable way. Furthermore, this study demonstrates an Ethereum based blockchain testbed exhibiting blockchain concepts and how they can be used in the field of P2P energy trading within a commodity microgrid using a sample use-case scenario.
In vehicle-to-grid (V2G) networks, battery-powered vehicle (BV) provides service to the power grid. In order to encourage more BVs to provide the service for power grid, it is necessary to reward the BVs from the power grid. To extensively deploy V2G networks, some security and privacy problems must be solved. In this paper, for the first time, we propose the novel concept of blockchain-based anonymous rewarding scheme (BBARS) for V2G networks. The novel concept comes from the application requirement which has not been solved by now. We give the formal system model and security model of BBARS. Then, we design the concrete BBARS scheme by making use of two different public key cryptosystem. Through security analysis and performance analysis, the designed scheme is provably secure and efficient. The analysis results also show the designed BBARS scheme is practical for secure V2G networks in smart grid.
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.
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.
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.