Privacy-Preserving Charging Coordination Scheme for Smart Power Grids Using a Blockchain

Abstract

With the rapid emergence of smart grids, charging coordination is considered the intrinsic actor that merges energy storage units (ESUs) into the grid in addition to its substantial role in boosting the resiliency and efficiency of the grid. However, it suffers from several challenges beginning with dependency on the energy service provider (ESP) as a single entity to manage the charging process, which makes the grid susceptible to several types of attacks such as a single point of failure or a denial-of-service attack (DoS). In addition, to schedule charging, the ESUs should submit charging requests including time to complete charging (TCC) and battery state of charge (SoC), which may disclose serious information relevant to the consumers. The analysis of this data could reveal the daily activities of those consumers. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preservation charging coordination scheme using a blockchain. The blockchain achieves decentralization and transparency to defeat the security issues related to centralized architectures. The privacy preservation will be fulfilled using a verifiable aggregation mechanism integrated with an aggregated signing technique to identify the untrusted aggregator and assure the data source and the identity of the sender. Security and performance evaluations are performed, including off-chain and on-chain experiments and simulations, to assess the security and efficiency of the scheme.