Elsevier

Computers & Security

Volume 103, April 2021, 102189
Computers & Security

A lightweight privacy-preserving and sharing scheme with dual-blockchain for intelligent pricing system of smart grid

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2021.102189Get rights and content

Abstract

With the deepening of the application of information technology, the development trend of smart grid as the next generation grid has pointed the way for the development of energy internet in the power industry. To protect the privacy of participants, this paper proposes a lightweight dual-blockchain privacy protection and sharing solution for smart grid intelligent pricing systems. We design a lightweight distributed cloud storage architecture based on dual blockchains. The cloud storage architecture stores the encrypted data and returns the address, thereby protecting the privacy of the data. A private blockchain is used to map the association between real identity and pseudonym. At the same time, a new shared blockchain is created for nodes with access control to reduce cost, ensure security and access resource on-demand. Then, secure signature authentication and identity-based proxy re-encryption strategies are designed. Encryption and bilinear pair-based signature scheme is used to aggregate data to support low-cost and high-performance computing. The evaluation results show that the scheme has the advantages of low latency, low response time and small storage cost, and can meet the growing demand for secure communication of full-service data of the smart grid.

Introduction

With the deepening of the application of information technology in power companies, as the development direction of the next-generation power grid in smart grids, smart pricing is a critical component in the future (Wu and Jin, 2009). Through real-time monitoring of various types of equipment in the power grid and real-time collection of power supply and demand information, the user’s electricity consumption can be priced, thereby ensuring the stable operation of the smart grid. A large amount of power grid business data is generated at the edge of the power network and needs to be transmitted to the data center through the Internet (Thones, 2015, Wu, Jin, 2009). Among them, the use of smart meters allows power users’ power consumption information to be collected in real-time, providing accurate power demand for smart grid pricing functions. However, the collection of electricity consumption data of smart meters also brings the risk of privacy exposure to users. The electricity consumption data can be used to analyze the user’s living habits, causing troubles for the user’s privacy, property security, etc (Thones, 2015). Tampered electrical data can pose a threat to the stability of the smart grid. The emergence of blockchain technology provides a new solution to the security problems faced by traditional centralized management systems. Its decentralized, anti-tampering and traceability features have useful application prospects in the secure collection and storage of privacy protection for electricity consumption data of smart meters.

Although there has been a lot of works to solve the privacy protection of smart grids, there are still some challenges to be addressed. This paper focuses on the following three issues. First, the associated management of pseudonyms and real identities. Pseudonyms can well protect the identity of users, but their association management with real identities is a challenge. Second, lightweight signature authentication. Because edge devices are resource-constrained devices with limited computing and storage capabilities, a lightweight signature authentication strategy is necessary. Third, safe and efficient data transmission and sharing. Existing data transmission schemes are to encrypt and transmit a large amount of local data to the control center, which consumes a lot of communication resources and costs and does not consider sharing with participants outside the system.

In order to solve the above problems, this paper proposes a lightweight privacy protection scheme. This scheme is based on dual-blockchain, using secure signature authentication and identity-based proxy re-encryption strategy to improve data security and a dual-blockchain strategy to reduce storage costs and improve query efficiency so that it can meet growing business needs. This scheme is designed for the power supply side and is oriented to the pricing center of the control center. The purpose of this scheme is to efficiently transmit the user’s electricity data to the control center under the premise of satisfying security, to facilitate the dynamic pricing of the pricing center. Combined with simulation, various performance indicators were analyzed and extensively evaluated to highlight the advantages of the proposed framework over current data privacy protection. The evaluation results by comparison with other schemes (Fan, Huang, Lai, 2014, Ni, Alharbi, Lin, Shen, Zhang, Zhao, Wu, Chen) show that the method can meet the design requirements of low latency, low response time and small storage cost. The main innovations of this scheme are as follows: Privacy protection On the one hand, for the privacy protection of smart grid systems, a smart grid data architecture based on dual blockchain is proposed. The architecture can not only realize the security management between users and anonymity but also realize the interaction with foreign participants. On the other hand, identity-based proxy re-encryption is designed to share the users private information with foreign participants. Efficient performanceOn the one hand, a signature verification scheme based on bilinear mapping is designed. The theoretical basis of the scheme is based on the difficult problem of the discrete logarithm, which can complete the signature verification of each participant safely and efficiently. On the other hand, based on the homomorphic encryption scheme, the user’s data will be encrypted before going out locally, efficiently aggregated at the aggregator, and sent to the control center.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The Section 2 introduces related work. The Section 3 introduces the preliminaries: bilinear pair mapping, homomorphic encryption system and identity-based proxy re-encryption algorithm. The Section 4 introduces the model and security requirements that this article will use. In the Section 5, we propose a lightweight data privacy protection and sharing scheme based on dual blockchain for smart grid. Next, we analyze the security of this model in Section 6. The 7th section combines the simulation to evaluate the various performance indexes extensively. Finally, a summary of this paper is given in Section 8.

Section snippets

Related work

Various protocols have been proposed for privacy protection in smart grids (Efthymiou, Kalogridis, 2010, Fan, Huang, Lai, 2014, Gai, Wu, Zhu, Xu, Zhang, 2019, Gope, Sikdar, 2019, He, Pan, Lin, 2018, Knirsch, Engel, Frincu, Prasanna, 2015, Li, Choi, Chae, 2013, Liang, Li, Lu, Lin, Shen, 2013, Niu, Tan, Zhou, Zheng, Zhu, 2013, Shuo, Weimin, Zhiwei, Hua, Yan, 2017, Wang, Qin, Wu, Xu, Domingo-Ferrer, 2015, Yang, Xue, Li, 2014, Yao, Wen, Liang, Fu, Zhang, Yang, 2019, Yuanpeng, Yixin, Runfa, Hong,

Bilinear pairing setting

Let G and GT be two multiplicative cyclic groups of prime order p, and g be a generator of G (Boneh and Franklin, 2001). Consider a bilinear map e:G×GGT satisfies the following properties:

  • (1)

    Bilinear: For all u,vG and a,bZp**, we have e(ua,vb)=e(u,v)ab and e(u,g)·e(v,g)=e(u·v,g).

  • (2)

    Nondegenerate: g should satisfy e(g,g)1Gτ.

  • (3)

    Computable: e(u,v) should be computable.

Identity-based proxy re-encryption

The identity-based proxy re-encryption algorithm is used in this paper to perform the encryption and decryption operations of the

System model

In our system model, as shown in Fig. 1, it includes entities such as users, smart meters, aggregators, control center, private clouds, trusted centers, salesmen, private blockchain, and public blockchain. Among them, smart meters and aggregators are the sub-control units of the control center. Considering a more practical situation, each user has a smart meter and a power account. The power account mainly stores the user’s identity, smart meter serial number and account balance. The smart

The proposed scheme

This scheme is designed for the power supply’s pricing center. The purpose of this solution is to transmit the user’s electricity data to the control center safely and efficiently, to facilitate the dynamic pricing of the control center and to share it with foreign users while protecting user privacy. This scheme is divided into three processes: initialization process, data generation and aggregation process, and sharing process. The parameters and explanations involved in this paper are shown

Security analysis

The security analysis in this paper considers the correctness and security based on the following theorem. We first consider the correctness of encryption and signature algorithms, as described in Theorem 1–3.

Theorem 1

If the user Ui, the aggregator Aj, and CC are honest and follow the procedures, the aggregated electricity data can be decrypted by CC, that is, the bilinear encryption algorithm meets the correctness.

Proof

In the scheme of this article, the smart meter SMi at user Ui encrypts the electricity

Experiment and performance analysis

We combine the experimental data to analyze the performance of the proposed scheme, which mainly includes experimental setup, computational complexity and communication load. In this part, we evaluate the performance of our scheme, as shown in Table 2. In addition, the basic settings of simulation experiment are shown in Table 3. In order to better evaluate the scheme designed in this paper, we first simulate the real-time performance of the system. To evaluate the real-time system, we need to

Conclusion

In this paper, we propose a lightweight dual-blockchain privacy protection and sharing solution for smart grid intelligent pricing systems. We combine blockchain, novel encryption and decryption algorithm and signature algorithm to adequately protect the confidentiality, privacy and integrity of electricity data. This solution uses the good properties of blockchain to improve data security. The evaluation results show that the scheme has the advantages of low latency, low response time and

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61772001).

Kun-Chang Li received the Master degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2019. He is currently studying for a PhD degree at North China Electric Power University. His current research interest includes privacy protection and sharing in Energy Internet.

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    Kun-Chang Li received the Master degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2019. He is currently studying for a PhD degree at North China Electric Power University. His current research interest includes privacy protection and sharing in Energy Internet.

    Yi-Fan Yang received the Bachelor degree from Taiyuan University in 2018. She is currently studying for a Master degree at North China Electric Power University. Her current research interest includes privacy protection and sharing in E-health.

    Shu-Hao Wang received the Bachelor degree from Liaocheng University in 2018. He is currently studying for a Master degree at North China Electric Power University. His current research interest includes Location privacy protection in vehicle networks.

    Run-Hua Shi received the PhD degree from University of Science and Technology of China in 2011. He is currently a Professor with North China Electric Power University. His current research interest includes classical and quantum cryptography, in particular, privacy-preserving multi-party computations.

    Jian-Bin Li received the Bachelor degree from Tsinghua University in 1992, received the Master degree from Analysis and Forecast Center of State Seismological Bureau from 1995. He worked at Central South University from January 2015 to December 2017 as the dean of the Institute of Information Security and Big Data. He is currently a Professor with North China Electric Power University. His current research interest includes information security, big data security and big data governance.

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