The rapid adoption of smart grids demands robust security and efficiency measures due to their critical role in delivering electricity and their potential for customer-oriented benefits. This paper presents an innovative framework, named RETINA, which provides a resilient and secure energy trading mechanism within smart grid systems. RETINA tackles the inherent security and infrastructure challenges in smart grids by establishing a trust-based security layer and facilitating energy transactions through blockchain technology. Our proposed solution integrates Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and the Web of Trust (WoT) concepts, promoting decentralized communication channels and robust key management. We further introduce a smart contract-based energy trading mechanism that factors in trust, distance, and energy type (green or non-green) in cost calculation. The utility and robustness of RETINA have been validated in a virtualized testbed environment with 500 nodes, demonstrating superior performance in terms of scalability and resilience compared to the existing WoT scheme. Furthermore, RETINA successfully enables a secure and efficient energy trading scheme, promoting the use of renewable energy sources. Future enhancements will include application to a realistic smart grid deployment and the integration of additional functionalities. This groundbreaking solution has the potential to revolutionize the smart grid ecosystem, addressing its current limitations and propelling the industry towards a future of advanced and secure energy exchange.
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 perfor…
Blockchain is increasingly being used to provide a distributed, secure, trusted, and private framework for energy trading in smart grids. However, existing solutions suffer from lack of privacy, processing and packet overheads, and reliance on Trusted Third Parties (TTP). To address these challenges, we propose a Secure Private Blockchain-based (SPB) framework. SPB enables the energy producers and consumers to directly negotiate the energy price. To reduce the associated packet overhead, we propose a routing method which routes packets based on the destination Public Key (PK). SPB eliminates t…
The blockchain technology empowers secure, trustless, and privacy-preserving trading with cryptocurrencies. However, existing blockchain-based trading platforms only support trading cryptocurrencies with digital assets (e.g., NFTs). Although several payment service providers have started to accept cryptocurrency as a payment method for tangible goods (e.g., Visa, PayPal), customers still need to trust and hand over their private information to centralized E-commerce platforms (e.g., Amazon, eBay). To enable trustless and privacy-preserving trading between cryptocurrencies and real goods, we pr…
Expanding multi-country emissions trading system is considered as crucial to fill the existing mitigation gap for the 2\degree C climate target. Trustworthy emissions accounting is the cornerstone of such a system encompassing different jurisdictions. However, traditional emissions measuring, reporting, and verification practices that support data authenticity might not be applicable as detailed data from large utilities and production facilities to be covered in the multi-country emissions trading system are usually highly sensitive and of severe national security concern. In this study, we p…
The smart grid incentivizes distributed agents with local generation (e.g., smart homes, and microgrids) to establish multi-agent systems for enhanced reliability and energy consumption efficiency. Distributed energy trading has emerged as one of the most important multi-agent systems on the power grid by enabling agents to sell their excessive local energy to each other or back to the grid. However, it requests all the agents to disclose their sensitive data (e.g., each agent's fine-grained local generation and demand load). In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we propose the first pr…
The desire to overcome reliability issues of distributed energy resources (DERs) lead researchers to development of a novel concept named as virtual power plant (VPP). VPPs are supposed to carry out intelligent, secure, and smart energy trading among prosumers, buyers, and generating stations along with providing efficient energy management. Therefore, integrating blockchain in a decentralized VPP network emerged as a new paradigm, and recent experiments over this integration have shown fruitful results. However, this decentralization also suffers with energy management, trust, reliability, an…
Personal IoT data is a new economic asset that individuals can trade to generate revenue on the emerging data marketplaces. Typically, marketplaces are centralized systems that raise concerns of privacy, single point of failure, little transparency and involve trusted intermediaries to be fair. Furthermore, the battery-operated IoT devices limit the amount of IoT data to be traded in real-time that affects buyer/seller satisfaction and hence, impacting the sustainability and usability of such a marketplace. This work proposes to utilize blockchain technology to realize a trusted and transparen…
The salient features of blockchain, such as decentralisation and transparency, have allowed the development of Decentralised Trust and Reputation Management Systems (DTRMS), which mainly aim to quantitatively assess the trustworthiness of the network participants and help to protect the network from adversaries. In the literature, proposals of DTRMS have been applied to various Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) applications, including supply chains, smart cities and distributed energy trading. In this chapter, we outline the building blocks of a generic DTRMS and discuss how it can benefit from blo…
The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）
In this paper, we propose a decentralized, privacy-friendly energy trading platform (PFET) based on game theoretical approach - specifically Stackelberg competition. Unlike existing trading schemes, PFET provides a competitive market in which prices and demands are determined based on competition, and computations are performed in a decentralized manner which does not rely on trusted third parties. It uses homomorphic encryption cryptosystem to encrypt sensitive information of buyers and sellers such as sellers$'$ prices and buyers$'$ demands. Buyers calculate total demand on particular seller…
In the Smart Grid with Renewable Energy Resources (RERs), the Residential Units (RUs) with Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) are considered to be both power consumers and suppliers. Specifically, RUs with excessive renewable generations can trade with the utility in deficit of power supplies for mutual benefits. It causes two challenging issues. First, the trading data of RUs is quite sensitive, which should be only accessed by authorized users with fine-grained policies. Second, the behaviors of the RUs to generate trading data are spontaneous and unpredictable, then the problem is how to g…
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…
Trust, security, and privacy are three of the major pillars to assemble the fifth generation network and beyond. Despite such pillars are principally interconnected, they arise a multitude of challenges to be addressed separately. 5G ought to offer flexible and pervasive computing capabilities across multiple domains according to user demands and assuring trustworthy network providers. Distributed marketplaces expect to boost the trading of heterogeneous resources so as to enable the establishment of pervasive service chains between cross-domains. Nevertheless, the need for reliable parties as…
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…
Flexible resources in built environments are seen as a low-cost opportunity for delivering grid management services. Consequently, the centralised aggregator model, where the aggregator is used to bundle demand flexibility from flexible resources and deliver it to flexibility customers such as Distributed/Transmission System Operator (DSO/TSO) in flexibility markets, has been adopted. However, the aggregator role introduces various security and trust challenges. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based flexibility trading framework dubbed PlexiChain to address the security and trust challen…
Data is central to the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Most of the current IoT systems are using centralized cloud-based data sharing systems, which will be difficult to scale up to meet the demands of future IoT systems. Involvement of such third-party service provider requires also trust from both sensor owner and sensor data user. Moreover, the fees need to be paid for their services. To tackle both the scalability and trust issues and to automatize the payments, this paper presents a blockchain based proxy re-encryption scheme. The system stores the IoT data in a distributed cloud afte…
