The concept of differential privacy emerged as a strong notion to protect database privacy in an untrusted environment. Later on, researchers proposed several variants of differential privacy in order to preserve privacy in certain other scenarios, such as real-time cyber physical systems. Since then, differential privacy has rigorously been applied to certain other domains which has the need of privacy preservation. One such domain is decentralized blockchain based smart metering, in which smart meters acting as blockchain nodes sent their real-time data to grid utility databases for real-time reporting. This data is further used to carry out statistical tasks, such as load forecasting, demand response calculation, etc. However, in case if any intruder gets access to this data it can leak privacy of smart meter users. In this context, differential privacy can be used to protect privacy of this data. In this chapter, we carry out comparison of four variants of differential privacy (Laplace, Gaussian, Uniform, and Geometric) in blockchain based smart metering scenario. We test these variants on smart metering data and carry out their performance evaluation by varying different parameters. Experimental outcomes shows at low privacy budget ($\varepsilon$) and at low reading sensitivity value ($δ$), these privacy preserving mechanisms provide high privacy by adding large amount of noise. However, among these four privacy preserving parameters Geometric parameters is more suitable for protecting high peak values and Laplace mechanism is more suitable for protecting low peak values at ($\varepsilon$ = 0.01).
This paper presents a new privacy-preserving smart metering system. Our scheme is private under the differential privacy model and therefore provides strong and provable guarantees. With our scheme, an (electricity) supplier can periodically collect data from smart meters and derive aggregated statistics while learning only limited information about the activities of individual households. For example, a supplier cannot tell from a user's trace when he watched TV or turned on heating. Our scheme is simple, efficient and practical. Processing cost is very limited: smart meters only have to add …
Electricity is an essential comfort to support our daily activities. With the competitive increase and energy costs by the industry, new values and opportunities for delivering electricity to customers are produced. One of these new opportunities is electric vehicles. With the arrival of electric vehicles, various challenges and opportunities are being presented in the electric power system worldwide. For example, under the traditional electric power billing scheme, electric power has to be consumed where it is needed so that end-users could not charge their electric vehicles at different poin…
In recent years, many proposals have arisen from research on privacy in smart metering. In one of the considered approaches, referred to as anonymization, smart meters transmit fine-grained electricity consumption values in such a way that the energy supplier can not exactly determine procedence. This paper measures the real privacy provided by such approach by taking into account that at the end of a billing period the energy supplier collects the overall electricity consumption of each meter for billing purposes. An entropy-based measure is proposed for quantifying privacy and determine the …
Most of the smart applications, such as smart energy metering devices, demand strong privacy preservation to strengthen data privacy. However, it is difficult to protect the privacy of the smart device data, especially on the client side. It is mainly because payment for billing is computed by the server deployed at the client's side, and it is highly challenging to prevent the leakage of client's information to unauthorised users. Various researchers have discussed this problem and have proposed different privacy preservation techniques. Conventional techniques suffer from the problem of high…
Smart metering infrastructure (SMI) is the core component of the smart grid (SG) which enables two-way communication between consumers and utility companies to control, monitor, and manage the energy consumption data. Despite their salient features, SMIs equipped with information and communication technology are associated with new threats due to their dependency on public communication networks. Therefore, the security of SMI communications raises the need for robust authentication and key agreement primitives that can satisfy the security requirements of the SG. Thus, in order to realize the…
Smart Grids are evolving as the next generation power systems that involve changes in the traditional ways of generation, transmission and distribution of power. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the key components in smart grids. An AMI comprises of systems and networks, that collects and analyzes data received from smart meters. In addition, AMI also provides intelligent management of various power-related applications and services based on the data collected from smart meters. Thus, AMI plays a significant role in the smooth functioning of smart grids. AMI is a privileged tar…
The Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is a vital element in the current development of the smart grid. AMI technologies provide electric utilities with an effective way of continuous monitoring and remote control of smart grid components. However, owing to its increasing scale and cyber-physical nature, the AMI has been faced with security threats in both cyber and physical domains. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the crucial cyber-physical attacks and counter defense mechanisms in the AMI. First, two attack surfaces are surveyed in the AMI including the communication networ…
Advanced Metering Infrastructure forms a communication network for the collection of power data from smart meters in Smart Grid. As the communication between smart meters could be secured utilizing public-key cryptography, however, public-key cryptography still has certain challenges in terms of certificate revocation and management particularly related distribution and storage overhead of revoked certificates. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel revocation management approach by utilizing cryptographic accumulators which reduces the space requirements for revocation i…
In this paper we propose a novel protocol that allows suppliers and grid operators to collect users' aggregate metering data in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. We use secure multiparty computation to ensure privacy protection. In addition, we propose three different data aggregation algorithms that offer different balances between privacy-protection and performance. Our protocol is designed for a realistic scenario in which the data need to be sent to different parties, such as grid operators and suppliers. Furthermore, it facilitates an accurate calculation of transmission, distributi…
Traditional electricity meters are replaced by Smart Meters in customers' households. Smart Meters collects fine-grained utility consumption profiles from customers, which in turn enables the introduction of dynamic, time-of-use tariffs. However, the fine-grained usage data that is compiled in this process also allows to infer the inhabitant's personal schedules and habits. We propose a privacy-preserving protocol that enables billing with time-of-use tariffs without disclosing the actual consumption profile to the supplier. Our approach relies on a zero-knowledge proof based on Pedersen Commi…
Energy providers are moving to the smart meter era, encouraging consumers to install, free of charge, these devices in their homes, automating consumption readings submission and making consumers life easier. However, the increased deployment of such smart devices brings a lot of security and privacy risks. In order to overcome such risks, Intrusion Detection Systems are presented as pertinent tools that can provide network-level protection for smart devices deployed in home environments. In this context, this paper is exploring the problems of Advanced Metering Infrastructures (AMI) and propo…
In smart grid, the Utility Provider (UP) collects users power measurements' for two main reasons: billing and operation. Billing needs coarse-grained measurements where there are no, or minimal, privacy concerns. On the other hand, operation needs fine-grained measurements which can highly affect users' privacy. Hence, users might be reluctant to participate in operational metering to protect their privacy. To overcome this issue, UP might offer rewards to allure users to report their measurements which endangers their privacy. In this paper, we survey the literature on privacy-preserving mete…
Smart metering is an essential feature of smart grids, allowing residential customers to monitor and reduce electricity costs. Devices called smart meters allows residential customers to monitor and reduce electricity costs, promoting energy saving, demand management, and energy efficiency. However, monitoring a households' energy consumption through smart meters poses serious privacy threats, and have thus become a major privacy issue. Hence, a significant amount of research has appeared recently with the purpose of providing methods and mechanisms to reconcile smart metering technologies and…
Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart home applications are rising in popularity. However, this trend attracts malicious activity, which causes cost-efficient security to be in high demand. This paper proposes a low-end design that reinforces the security of a home network. It uses private blockchain technology and localization via RSSI-based trilateration. We investigated the benefits of private blockchains over their public counterpart, and we improve the precision of the localization algorithm by testing it against different wireless technologies. The results conclude that using a private bl…
In the smart grid, smart meters, and numerous control and monitoring applications employ bidirectional wireless communication, where security is a critical issue. In key management based encryption method for the smart grid, the Trusted Third Party (TTP), and links between the smart meter and the third party are assumed to be fully trusted and reliable. However, in wired/wireless medium, a man-in-middle may want to interfere, monitor and control the network, thus exposing its vulnerability. Acknowledging this, in this paper, we propose a novel two level encryption method based on two partially…
Blockchain was always associated with Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and digital asset trading. However, its benefits are far beyond that. It supports technologies like the Internet-of-Things (IoT) to pave the way for futuristic smart environments, like smart homes, smart transportation, smart energy trading, smart industries, smart supply chains, and more. To enable these environments, IoT devices, machines, appliances, and vehicles, need to intercommunicate without the need for centralized trusted parties. Blockchain replaces these trusted parties in such trustless environments. It provides secu…
We present models for utilizing blockchain and smart contract technology with the widely used OAuth 2.0 open authorization framework to provide delegated authorization for constrained IoT devices. The models involve different tradeoffs in terms of privacy, delay, and cost, while exploiting key advantages of blockchains and smart contracts. These include linking payments to authorization grants, immutably recording authorization information and policies in smart contracts, and offering resilience through the execution of smart contract code on all blockchain nodes.
Blockchain has revolutionized how transactions are conducted by ensuring secure and auditable peer-to-peer coordination. This is due to both the development of decentralization, and the promotion of trust among peers. Blockchain and fog computing are currently being evaluated as potential support for software and a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from banking practices and digital transactions to cyber-physical systems. These systems are designed to work in highly complex, sometimes even adversarial, environments, and to synchronize heterogeneous machines and manufacturing facilities in…
The blockchain is a distributed technology which allows establishing trust among unreliable users who interact and perform transactions with each other. While blockchain technology has been mainly used for crypto-currency, it has emerged as an enabling technology for establishing trust in the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT). Nevertheless, a naive usage of the blockchain for IoT leads to high delays and extensive computational power. In this paper, we propose a blockchain architecture dedicated to being used in a supply chain which comprises different distributed IoT entities. We propose …
In this paper, we discuss the integration of blockchain in smart energy systems. We present various blockchain technology solutions, review important blockchain platforms, and several blockchain based smart energy projects in different smart energy domains. The majority of blockchain platforms with embedded combination of blockchain technology solutions are computing- and resource- intensive, and hence not entirely suitable for smart energy applications. We consider the requirements of smart energy systems and accordingly identify appropriate blockchain technology solutions for smart energy ap…
Cybersecurity is an inherent characteristic that should be addressed before the large deployment of smart city applications. Recently, Blockchain appears as a promising technology to provide several cybersecurity aspects of smart city applications. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the existing blockchain-based solutions for the cybersecurity of the main smart city applications, namely smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart agriculture, supply chain management, smart grid, and smart homes. We describe the existing solutions and we discuss their merits and limits. Moreover, w…
Cross-Blockchain communication has gained traction due to the increasing fragmentation of blockchain networks and scalability solutions such as side-chaining and sharding. With SmartSync, we propose a novel concept for cross-blockchain smart contract interactions that creates client contracts on arbitrary blockchain networks supporting the same execution environment. Client contracts mirror the logic and state of the original instance and enable seamless on-chain function executions providing recent states. Synchronized contracts supply instant read-only function calls to other applications ho…
In recent years, manifold blockchain protocols have been proposed by researchers and industrial companies alike. This has led to a very heterogeneous blockchain landscape. Accordingly, it would be desirable if blockchains could interact with each other. However, current blockchain technologies offer only limited support for interoperability, thus preventing tokens or smart contracts from leaving the scope of a particular blockchain. As a first step towards a solution for cross-chain smart contract interactions, we introduce a framework which allows to invoke a smart contract from another block…
Blockchain-based smart contract has become a growing field in the blockchain technology. What was once a technology used to solve digital transaction issues turns out to have some wider usage, including smart contract. The development of smart contract can be traced from the numerous platforms facilitating it, however the issue on how well each platform works as oppose to each other has yet been fully explored. The usage of smart contract can be seen from the applications that are built on top of the smart contract platform, such as the tokenization of real world to virtual world assets. Howev…
The emerging blockchain technology supports decentralized computing paradigm shift and is a rapidly approaching phenomenon. While blockchain is thought primarily as the basis of Bitcoin, its application has grown far beyond cryptocurrencies due to the introduction of smart contracts. Smart contracts are self-enforcing pieces of software, which reside and run over a hosting blockchain. Using blockchain-based smart contracts for secure and transparent management to govern interactions (authentication, connection, and transaction) in Internet-enabled environments, mostly IoT, is a niche area of r…
Currently, blockchain proposals are being adopted to solve security issues, such as data integrity, resilience, and non-repudiation. To improve certain aspects, e.g., energy consumption and latency, of traditional blockchains, different architectures, algorithms, and data management methods have been recently proposed. For example, appendable-block blockchain uses a different data structure designed to reduce latency in block and transaction insertion. It is especially applicable in domains such as Internet of Things (IoT), where both latency and energy are key concerns. However, the lack of s…
Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in the blockchain technology, and many blockchain-based applications have been developed to take advantage of its decentralization, transparency, fault tolerance, and strong security. In the field of smart grids, a plethora of proposals have emerged to utilize blockchain for augmenting intelligent energy management, energy trading, security and privacy protection, microgrid management, and energy vehicles. Compared with traditional centralized approaches, blockchain-based solutions are able to exploit the advantages of blockchain to realize be…
Existing education systems are facing a threat of question paper leaking (QPL) in the exam which jeopardizes the quality of education. Therefore, it is high time to think about a more secure and flexible question sharing system which can prevent QPL issue in the future education system. Blockchain enables a way of creating and storing transactions, contracts or anything that requires protection against tampering, accessing etc. This paper presents a new scheme for smart education, by utilizing the concept of blockchain, for question sharing. A two-phase encryption technique for encrypting ques…
This research critically analyses blockchain scaling solutions based on their ability to realistically balance the properties of the blockchain trilemma. We have concluded this research by outlining a gap in the current body of literature and implementation of scalability solutions. An extended UTXO transaction model is proposed to overcome challenges associated with implementing both layer one and layer two scaling solutions in a blockchain system. The examination of industry approaches is used to justify this direction and puts forth a basis for future work.
There is an ongoing competition among blockchain technologies and the existence of one ultimate blockchain is impossible for many reasons. On the other hand, such variety can create difficulties in adoption, especially for the governments and corporations. The proposed technology ensures a blockchain agnostic approach and aimed to create a unified ecosystem of multiple networks. The cross-blockchain protocol can be used to develop services where end-users decide for themselves their most preferred blockchain. The invention solves problems of duplication of tokens in the result of hardforks, is…
An appealing feature of blockchain technology is smart contracts. A smart contract is executable code that runs on top of the blockchain to facilitate, execute and enforce an agreement between untrusted parties without the involvement of a trusted third party. In this paper, we conduct a systematic mapping study to collect all research that is relevant to smart contracts from a technical perspective. The aim of doing so is to identify current research topics and open challenges for future studies in smart contract research. We extract 24 papers from different scientific databases. The results …
This chapter contributes to evolving the versatility and complexity of blockchain-enabled services through extending the functionality of blockchain-enforced smart contracts. The contributions include: (i) a method for automated management of contracts with hierarchical conditionality structures through an hierarchy of intelligent agents and the use of hierarchical cryptographic key-pairs; (ii) a method for efficient and secure matching and transfer of smart- contract underlyings (entities) among disparate smart contracts/subcontracts; (iii) a method for producing an hierarchy of common secret…
The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is facing significant scalability and security challenges. On the one hand, IoT devices are "weak" and need external assistance. Edge computing provides a promising direction addressing the deficiency of centralized cloud computing in scaling massive number of devices. On the other hand, IoT devices are also relatively "vulnerable" facing malicious hackers due to resource constraints. The emerging blockchain and smart contracts technologies bring a series of new security features for IoT and edge computing. In this paper, to address the challenges, we desi…
Smart Grid, an intelligent connected grid consisting of millions of smart devices, used to collect data from the grid to improve the efficiency of its operation. These smart devices communicating wirelessly are susceptible to attacks and hence the security and privacy of the smart devices along with the smart grid is a major challenge. Blockchain-based systems provide improved security and privacy and hence gained a lot of attention in the recent past. This paper proposes a blockchain-based architecture for Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs) and Home Area networks (HANs) in Smart Grid. The pape…
Blockchain technology has evolved from being an immutable ledger of transactions for cryptocurrencies to a programmable interactive the environment for building distributed reliable applications. Although, blockchain technology has been used to address various challenges, to our knowledge none of the previous work focused on using blockchain to develop a secure and immutable scientific data provenance management framework that automatically verifies the provenance records. In this work, we leverage blockchain as a platform to facilitate trustworthy data provenance collection, verification, and…
Raziel combines secure multi-party computation and proof-carrying code to provide privacy, correctness and verifiability guarantees for smart contracts on blockchains. Effectively solving DAO and Gyges attacks, this paper describes an implementation and presents examples to demonstrate its practical viability (e.g., private and verifiable crowdfundings and investment funds). Additionally, we show how to use Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Proofs (i.e., Proof-Carrying Code certificates) to prove the validity of smart contracts to third parties before their execution without revealing anything else. Fi…
Blockchains and smart contracts are an emerging, promising technology, that has received considerable attention. We use the blockchain technology, and in particular Ethereum, to implement a large-scale event-based Internet of Things (IoT) control system. We argue that the distributed nature of the "ledger," as well as, Ethereum's capability of parallel execution of replicated "smart contracts", provide the sought after automation, generality, flexibility, resilience, and high availability. We design a realistic blockchain-based IoT architecture, using existing technologies while by taking into…
Blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are current hot topics in research and practice. However, the potentials of their combination have been studied just recently to a larger extend. While different use cases for combining AI and blockchain have been discussed, the idea of enabling blockchain-based smart contracts to perform "smarter" decisions by using AI or machine learning (ML) models has only been considered on the conceptual level so far. It remained open, how such AI-enabled smart contracts could be implemented in a robust way for real-world applications. Therefore, in …
Tennessee Tech. University（田纳西理工大学）；Idaho State University（爱达荷州立大学）；Umm Al-Qura University（乌姆·库拉大学）
In smart grid, malicious customers may compromise their smart meters (SMs) to report false readings to achieve financial gains illegally. Reporting false readings not only causes hefty financial losses to the utility but may also degrade the grid performance because the reported readings are used for energy management. This paper is the first work that investigates this problem in the net-metering system, in which one SM is used to report the difference between the power consumed and the power generated. First, we prepare a benign dataset for the net-metering system by processing a real power …
University of Calcutta（加尔各答大学）；University of California（加利福尼亚大学）
Standard security protocols like SSL, TLS, IPSec etc. have high memory and processor consumption which makes all these security protocols unsuitable for resource constrained platforms such as Internet of Things (IoT). Blockchain (BC) finds its efficient application in IoT platform to preserve the five basic cryptographic primitives, such as confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, availability and non-repudiation. Conventional adoption of BC in IoT platform causes high energy consumption, delay and computational overhead which are not appropriate for various resource constrained IoT devices. …
Owing to some special characteristics and features, blockchain is a very useful technique that can securely organize diverse devices in a smart city. It finds wide applications, especially in distributed environments, where entities such as wireless sensors need to be certain of the authenticity of the server. As contemporary blockchain techniques that address post-quantum concerns have not been designed, in this study, we investigate a blockchain in the post-quantum setting and seek to discover how it can resist attacks from quantum computing. In addition, traditional proof of work (PoW)-base…
The popularity and applicability of mobile crowdsensing applications are continuously increasing due to the widespread of mobile devices and their sensing and processing capabilities. However, we need to offer appropriate incentives to the mobile users who contribute their resources and preserve their privacy. Blockchain technologies enable semi-anonymous multi-party interactions and can be utilized in crowdsensing applications to maintain the privacy of the mobile users while ensuring first-rate crowdsensed data. In this work, we propose to use blockchain technologies and smart contracts to o…
A smart contract is a digital program of transaction protocol (rules of contract) based on the consensus architecture of blockchain. Smart contracts with Blockchain are modern technologies that have gained enormous attention in scientific and practical applications. A smart contract is the central aspect of a blockchain that facilitates blockchain as a platform outside the cryptocurrency spectrum. The development of blockchain technology, with a focus on smart contracts, has advanced significantly in recent years. However research on the smart contract idea has weaknesses in the implementation…
The proliferation of sensor technologies in Industrial Control Systems (ICS) helped to transform the environment towards better automation, process control and monitoring. However, sensor technologies expose the smart cities of the future to complex security challenges. Luckily, the sensing capabilities also create opportunities to capture various data types, which apart from operational use can add substantial value to developing mechanisms to protect ICS and critical infrastructure. We discuss Blockchain (BC), a disruptive technology with applications ranging from cryptocurrency to smart con…
Traditional smart grid energy auctions cannot directly be integrated in blockchain due to its decentralized nature. Therefore, research works are being carried out to propose efficient decentralized auctions for energy trading. Since, blockchain is a novel paradigm which ensures trust, but it also comes up with a curse of high computation and communication complexity which eventually causes resource scarcity. Therefore, there is a need to develop and encourage development of greener and computational-friendly auctions to carry out decentralized energy trading. In this paper, we first provide a…
Blockchain is one of the most popular topics for discussion now. However, most experts still see this technology as only part of Bitcoin, other crypto-currencies or money transfer systems. Often, new solutions, proposed by young researchers, are blocked by reviewers, only because these solutions can not be used for Bitcoins. However, Blockchain technology is more universal and can be used also in other areas, for example, in IoT, WSN and mobile devices. This paper considers the implementation of Blockchain technology in sensor networks as an element of IoT. The concept of "Rolling Blockchain" …
