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A blockchain-based framework for privacy-preserving and verifiable billing in smart grid

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Abstract

Smart grid allows the electricity service provider (ESP) to provide reliable, accurate and efficient services to users. To protect the privacy of the collected smart meter data that may contain the private information of users, these data should be transmitted and stored at the ESP side in ciphertext format. However, due to the limited storage capability, the readings are not maintained at the user side, which brings the challenge for users to verify the correctness of electricity consumption bills. To address these issues, this paper proposes a blockchain-based privacy-preserving billing (BPB) framework based on the BGN encryption scheme, which allows ESP to produce monthly bills for users and supports the user to request ordinary bill for any period. Compared with existing solutions, our BPB construction supports ordinary bill request. Security analysis demonstrates that the proposed BPB construction can guarantee the privacy of smart meter readings, and the integrity and correctness of monthly bill and ordinary bill. Performance analysis indicates the efficiency of a BPB instantiation in applications.

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Acknowledgements

This article is supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China under project 2020YFB1006004, the Guangxi Natural Science Foundation under grants 2019GXNSFFA245015 and 2019GXNSFGA245004, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under projects 62162017, 62172119 and 61962012, and the PCNL Major Key Project under grants PCL2021A09, PCL2021A02, and PCL2022A03.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Guangxi Key Laboratory of Cryptography and Information Security, School of Computer Science and Information Security, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin, 541004, China

    Meng Zhao, Yong Ding & Hai Liang

  2. Cyberspace Security Research Center, Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China

    Yong Ding

  3. School of Electronic Engineering and Automation, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin, 541004, China

    Shijie Tang

  4. School of Mathematics and Computing Science, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin, 541004, China

    Huiyong Wang

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  1. Meng Zhao
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Correspondence to Yong Ding.

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Zhao, M., Ding, Y., Tang, S. et al. A blockchain-based framework for privacy-preserving and verifiable billing in smart grid. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 16, 142–155 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-022-01379-4

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