Keynote David Rose The New Vanguard for Business: Connectivity, Design, and the Internet of Things The Internet of Things is the hottest topic of the moment a shift predicted to be as momentous as the impact of the internet itself. The internet has allowed us to share ideas and data largely input by humans. What about a world where data from objects as diverse as umbrellas, fridges, and gas tanks all flows through the internet?

The Internet of things.

The concept of smart grid has been introduced as a new vision of the conventional power grid to figure out an efficient way of integrating green and renewable energy technologies. In this way, Internet-connected smart grid, also called energy Internet, is also emerging as an innovative approach to ensure the energy from anywhere at any time. The ultimate goal of these developments is to build a sustainable society. However, integrating and coordinating a large number of growing connections can be a challenging issue for the traditional centralized grid system. Consequently, the smart grid is undergoing a transformation to the decentralized topology from its centralized form. On the other hand, blockchain has some excellent features which make it a promising application for smart grid paradigm. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive survey on application of blockchain in smart grid. As such, we identify the significant security challenges of smart grid scenarios that can be addressed by blockchain. Then, we present a number of blockchain-based recent research works presented in different literatures addressing security issues in the area of smart grid. We also summarize several related practical projects, trials, and products that have been emerged recently. Finally, we discuss essential research challenges and future directions of applying blockchain to smart grid security issues.

Blockchain for Future Smart Grid: A Comprehensive Survey

Contemporarily, two emerging techniques, blockchain and edge computing, are driving a dramatical rapid growth in the field of Internet-of-Things (IoT). Benefits of applying edge computing is an adoptable complementarity for cloud computing; blockchain is an alternative for constructing transparent secure environment for data storage/governance. Instead of using these two techniques independently, in this article, we propose a novel approach that integrates IoT with edge computing and blockchain, which is called blockchain-based Internet of Edge model. The proposed model, designed for a scalable and controllable IoT system, sufficiently exploits advantages of edge computing and blockchain to establish a privacy-preserving mechanism while considering other constraints, such as energy cost. We implement experiment evaluations running on Ethereum. According to our data collections, the proposed model improves privacy protections without lowering down the performance in an energy-efficient manner.

Differential Privacy-Based Blockchain for Industrial Internet-of-Things

In a research community, data sharing is an essential step to gain maximum knowledge from the prior work. Existing data sharing platforms depend on trusted third party (TTP). Due to the involvement of TTP, such systems lack trust, transparency, security, and immutability. To overcome these issues, this paper proposed a blockchain-based secure data sharing platform by leveraging the benefits of interplanetary file system (IPFS). A meta data is uploaded to IPFS server by owner and then divided into n secret shares. The proposed scheme achieves security and access control by executing the access roles written in smart contract by owner. Users are first authenticated through RSA signatures and then submit the requested amount as a price of digital content. After the successful delivery of data, the user is encouraged to register the reviews about data. These reviews are validated through Watson analyzer to filter out the fake reviews. The customers registering valid reviews are given incentives. In this way, maximum reviews are submitted against every file. In this scenario, decentralized storage, Ethereum blockchain, encryption, and incentive mechanism are combined. To implement the proposed scenario, smart contracts are written in solidity and deployed on local Ethereum test network. The proposed scheme achieves transparency, security, access control, authenticity of owner, and quality of data. In simulation results, an analysis is performed on gas consumption and actual cost required in terms of USD, so that a good price estimate can be done while deploying the implemented scenario in real set-up. Moreover, computational time for different encryption schemes are plotted to represent the performance of implemented scheme, which is shamir secret sharing (SSS). Results show that SSS shows the least computational time as compared to advanced encryption standard (AES) 128 and 256.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/24/7054/pdf

A Secure Data Sharing Platform Using Blockchain and Interplanetary File System

In this paper, a blockchain-based data sharing and access control system is proposed, for communication between the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The proposed system is intended to overcome the issues related to trust and authentication for access control in IoT networks. Moreover, the objectives of the system are to achieve trustfulness, authorization, and authentication for data sharing in IoT networks. Multiple smart contracts such as Access Control Contract (ACC), Register Contract (RC), and Judge Contract (JC) are used to provide efficient access control management. Where ACC manages overall access control of the system, and RC is used to authenticate users in the system, JC implements the behavior judging method for detecting misbehavior of a subject (i.e., user). After the misbehavior detection, a penalty is defined for that subject. Several permission levels are set for IoT devices’ users to share services with others. In the end, performance of the proposed system is analyzed by calculating cost consumption rate of smart contracts and their functions. A comparison is made between existing and proposed systems. Results show that the proposed system is efficient in terms of cost. The overall execution cost of the system is 6,900,000 gas units and the transaction cost is 5,200,000 gas units.

Data Sharing System Integrating Access Control Mechanism using Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts for IoT Devices

Attribute-based encryption, especially ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption, plays an important role in the data sharing. In the process of data sharing, the secret key does not contain the specific information of users, who may share his secret key with other users for benefits without being discovered. In addition, the attribute authority can generate the secret key from any attribute set. If the secret key is abused, it is difficult to judge whether the abused private key comes from users or the attribute authority. Besides, the access control structure usually leaks sensitive information in a distributed network, and the efficiency of attribute-based encryption is a bottleneck of its applications. Fortunately, blockchain technology can guarantee the integrity and non-repudiation of data. In view of the above issues, an efficient and privacy-preserving traceable attribute-based encryption scheme is proposed. In the proposed scheme, blockchain technologies are used to guarantee both integrity and non-repudiation of data, and the ciphertext can be quickly generated by using the pre-encryption technology. Moreover, attributes are hidden in anonymous access control structures by using the attribute bloom filter. When a secret key is abused, the source of the abused secret key can be audited. Security and performance analysis show that the proposed scheme is secure and efficient.

Efficient and privacy-preserving traceable attribute-based encryption in blockchain

As an extension of cloud computing, fog computing has received more attention in recent years. It can solve problems such as high latency, lack of support for mobility and location awareness in cloud computing. In the Internet of Things (IoT), a series of IoT devices can be connected to the fog nodes that assist a cloud service center to store and process a part of data in advance. Not only can it reduce the pressure of processing data, but also improve the real-time and service quality. However, data processing at fog nodes suffers from many challenging issues, such as false data injection attacks, data modification attacks, and IoT devices’ privacy violation. In this paper, based on the Paillier homomorphic encryption scheme, we use blinding factors to design a privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme in fog computing. No matter whether the fog node and the cloud control center are honest or not, the proposed scheme ensures that the injection data is from legal IoT devices and is not modified and leaked. The proposed scheme also has fault tolerance, which means that the collection of data from other devices will not be affected even if certain fog devices fail to work. In addition, security analysis and performance evaluation indicate the proposed scheme is secure and efficient.

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Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation against False Data Injection Attacks in Fog Computing

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have attracted enormous attention from academics and industries, and one of the most representative application is the smart grid. Most smart grid system models have to rely on trusted third-parties, but there are no trusted third-parties in practice. Blockchain technologies show a lot of advantages in IoT due to its unique characteristics. In this paper, to enable reliability, efficiency, flexibility and security in smart grid trading, we combine blockchain technologies, proof of stake consensus mechanisms and cryptography tools to build a novel smart grid power trading system. Our security analysis shows that the proposed system can protect users’ data privacy.

Smart Grid Power Trading Based on Consortium Blockchain in Internet of Things

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), a large number of IoT device data has flooded into cloud computing service centers, which has greatly increased the data processing task of cloud computing. To alleviate this situation, IoT enabled fog computing comes into being and it is necessary to aggregate the collected data of multiple IoT devices at the fog node. In this paper, we consider a privacy-aware data collection and aggregation scheme for fog computing. Although the fog node and the cloud control center are honest-but-curious, the proposed scheme also ensures that the data privacy will not be leaked. Our security and performance analysis indicates that the proposed scheme is secure and efficient in terms of computation and communication cost.

Privacy-Aware Data Collection and Aggregation in IoT Enabled Fog Computing

The intelligence of the information era is accomplished through data sharing, which enables us to perform more insightful analysis and make better decisions. However, traditional data trading systems are typically centralized managed with high operating costs and associated risk of single point of failure. Furthermore, it is going to be increasingly more common to see malicious data and behavior during the transactions. This paper proposes a P2P data trading scheme based on blockchain for Internet of Things (IoT). The proposed scheme provides an efficient negotiated pricing model in the data trading process. Chameleon hashing algorithm has been adopted to advance the robustness of the trading scheme by detecting malicious data on the chain and implementing error correction and loss control. Additionally, information entropy is incorporated as data privacy measurement. The security analysis and experimental results show that the proposed data trading scheme is secure and efficient.

Xiaokun Zheng

Papers

Efficient and privacy-preserving traceable attribute-based encryption in blockchain

Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation against False Data Injection Attacks in Fog Computing

Smart Grid Power Trading Based on Consortium Blockchain in Internet of Things

Privacy-Aware Data Collection and Aggregation in IoT Enabled Fog Computing

Achieving Secure and Efficient P2P Data Trading based on Blockchain for Internet of Things