A Hybrid Blockchain-Based Log Management Scheme With Nonrepudiation for Smart Grids

Abstract

In the era of Industry 4.0 and digital transformation, smart grid (SG) plays an important role in the construction of various smart places. Logs produced by electrical appliances recording power consumption within the grid contain private information and may be collected as evidence for the services of dispute resolution or digital forensics. Therefore, security of the logs is of paramount importance. Our work designs a blockchain-enabled log management scheme with nonrepudiation for SGs. In this article, we employ ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption to establish a fine-grained access control of the logs, which addresses data confidentiality concern. In addition, we introduce a hybrid blockchain system generating novel signature chains, for achieving an efficient private log protection system with a lot of properties including data loss prevention, tamper resistance, immutability and nonrepudiation. Employing various cost-saving solutions, our scheme achieves an efficient communication with more functionalities and security features, compared with the predecessor works.