A Countermeasure for Double Spending Attacks on Blockchain Technology in Smart Grid

Abstract

As a distributed technology, blockchain has been applied in many fields. Much research has been done on its inherent security issues. Among these security issues, double spending is one of the most pernicious. Current countermeasures are not systematic, they either focus on monitoring or detection with no effective strategy to prevent future double spending. These countermeasures also have serious drawbacks, such as high network traffic, high CPU utilization, and heavy management overhead. In this paper, we present a systematic approach to address double spending attack on smart grid. A reputable node is selected, which constantly compares all transactions in current time window with previously validated block and current block. Upon discovering conflicting transactions, a warning message with the conflicting transaction and two penalty transactions are broadcasted to the network to stop the current attack and to prevent future attacks. Our experiment has demonstrated our design is highly effective to detect double spending, with short detection time and low CPU utilizations.