A Blockchain-Based Architecture for Securing Industrial IoTs Data in Electric Smart Grid

Abstract

There are numerous internet-connected devices attached to the industrial process through recent communication technologies, which enable machine-to-machine communication and the sharing of sensitive data through a new technology called the industrial internet of things (IIoTs). Most of the suggested security mechanisms are vulnerable to several cybersecurity threats due to their reliance on cloud-based services, external trusted authorities, and centralized architectures; they have high computation and communication costs, low performance, and are exposed to a single authority of failure and bottleneck. Blockchain technology (BC) is widely adopted in the industrial sector for its valuable features in terms of decentralization, security, and scalability. In our work, we propose a decentralized, scalable, lightweight, trusted and secure private network based on blockchain technology/smart contracts for the overhead circuit breaker of the electrical power grid of the Al-Kufa/Iraq power plant as an industrial application. The proposed scheme offers a double layer of data encryption, device authentication, scalability, high performance, low power consumption, and improves the industry’s operations; provides efficient access control to the sensitive data generated by circuit breaker sensors and helps reduce power wastage. We also address data aggregation operations, which are considered challenging in electric power smart grids. We utilize a multi-chain proof of rapid authentication (McPoRA) as a consensus mechanism, which helps to enhance the computational performance and effectively improve the latency. The advanced reduced instruction set computer (RISC) machines ARM Cortex-M33 microcontroller adopted in our work, is characterized by ultra-low power consumption and high performance, as well as efficiency in terms of real-time cryptographic algorithms such as the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA). This improves the computational execution, increases the implementation speed of the asymmetric cryptographic algorithm and provides data integrity and device authenticity at the perceptual layer. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves excellent performance, data security, real-time data processing, low power consumption (70.880 mW), and very low memory utilization (2.03% read-only memory (RAM) and 0.9% flash memory) and execution time (0.7424 s) for the cryptographic algorithm. This enables autonomous network reconfiguration on-demand and real-time data processing.