A privacy protection scheme of smart meter for decentralized smart home environment based on consortium blockchain

Abstract

In order to ensure the reasonable dispatch and utilization of power in smart homes, decentralized smart homes need to send power information to the power control center, and the power control center need to send control instructions to smart homes. However, the bi-directional interaction between smart homes and the power control center may lead to a series of security problems, such as smart meters of smart homes collect fine-grained real-time power consumption data and upload it to the control center, which will lead to the leakage of users’ privacy. The existing schemes protect users’ privacy by signcryption and data aggregation usually, and elliptic curve bilinear pairing or exponential operation are used in most of them, whose computation costs is high. In addition, the existing schemes for centralized storage of power consumption data may result in some security problems, such as single point failure, malicious tampering of data, etc. Aiming at the problems above, a privacy protection scheme of smart meter for decentralized smart home environment based on consortium blockchain is proposed, elliptic curve point multiplication operation is used in the certificateless aggregated ring signcryption algorithm, which reduces the computing and communication costs; distributed storage of users’ data with consortium blockchain is used to solve the problem of single point failure and data tampering. Theoretical analysis proves that the scheme not only guarantees users’ privacy, but also has characteristics of confidentiality and unforgeability, and experiments show that the scheme has lower computing and communication costs.