The Internet of Things (IoT) devices possessed by individuals produce massive amounts of data. The private data onto specific IoT devices can be combined with intelligent platform to provide help for future research and prediction. As an important digital asset, individuals can sell private data to get rewards. Problems, such as privacy, security, and access control prevent individuals from sharing their private data. The blockchain technology is widely used to build an anonymous trading system. In this article, we construct a blockchain-based privacy-preserving and rewarding private data-sharing scheme (BPRPDS) for IoT. A privacy issue worth considering is that the malicious cloud server may establish a behavior profile database of data users (DUs). In the case of anonymity, the transactions of private data sharing are easy to cause disputes. When anonymous DUs are framed, it is hard to protect their rights. With the help of the deniable ring signature and Monero, we realize the behavior profile building prevention and nonframeability of BPRPDS. At the same time, we utilize the licensing technology executed by smart contracts to ensure flexible access control of multisharing. The proposed BPRPDS is provably secure. Performance analysis and experimental results show that BPRPDS is efficient and practical.

Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preserving and Rewarding Private Data Sharing for IoT

In the context of modern power system development to support the evolution towards green energy and carbon-neutral emission goals, many existing problems and even challenges demand new technical solutions. In recent years, decentralized blockchain technology has been employed to address some problems in power systems, and many papers have been published. In this paper, the concept of blockchain is first introduced. A brief survey of the existing publications regarding the applications of blockchain in power systems, including power system dispatching, microgrid operation, energy trading, electricity trading settlement, transmission, and distribution system operation, is then carried out. In addition, several application scenarios of blockchain technology in power systems are also introduced. Through the discussion, we found that we still need to weigh the advantages and disadvantages, overcome its leakage, and bring its value into play if we apply blockchain technology in modern power systems in support of zero carbon goals.

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Applications of Blockchain Technology in Modern Power Systems: A Brief Survey

With the rapid transformation of the energy sector towards modern power systems represented by smart grids (SGs), microgrids (MG), and distributed generation, blockchain (BC) technology has shown the capability for solving security, privacy, and reliability challenges that hinder progress. Currently, the energy structure is forming a decentralized system that prioritizes customer satisfaction. BC technology undertakes power network stockholders in a secure energy market, transparent transactions, and fair competition and offers promising energy solutions. This paper is a comprehensive review of energy applications using BC integration. Firstly, we introduce the drivers of BC leverage that make it a potentially important component of the power network. Following that, we provide background information on BC and its application in areas other than the energy sector. Subsequently, we discuss studies and sort potential energy applications from various recent papers and surveys that have already adopted BC technology in the energy sector. Then, we summarize the pricing infrastructure for applying BC in the energy sector and identify the requirements to build it. Finally, energy security and privacy challenges based on BC are highlighted, along with potential drawbacks and concerns related to the pricing infrastructure.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielx7/6287639/6514899/09841550.pdf

Review on Energy Application Using Blockchain Technology With an Introductions in the Pricing Infrastructure

A Blockchain Based User Subscription Data Management and Access Control Scheme in Mobile Communication Networks

In mobile communication networks, when a user roams to and accesses a foreign network, the foreign operator needs to request the user’s subscription data from a centralized authentication server, which is managed by the user’s home operator. However, centralized authentication introduces single point of failure. Meanwhile, the real-time participation of the home operator and the trust relationship between the foreign operator and the home operator are difficult to guarantee. In this paper, by adopting blockchain and smart contracts, we propose a secure and efficient access control scheme of user subscription data in roaming scenarios. We further design a flexible user authentication scheme, which utilizes derivable tokens based on the proposed access control scheme. By using blockchain to store and manage user subscription data, access control can be decentralized without any trusted third party. Besides, by implementing automatic verification of access privilege through smart contracts, the limitation of the home operators’ real-time participation is eliminated. In addition, to further improve security and reduce the on-chain storage overhead, we optimize the data encryption and storage scheme utilizing threshold secret sharing. Our security and performance analysis show that the proposed user subscription data access control scheme for roaming service provides high-level security while causing acceptable time and storage overhead.

Power generation systems tend to be distributed and decentralized, and therefore the concept of microgrid has been proposed, which needs to implement decentralized data storage and power dispatching. The traditional power system architecture is no longer suitable in the decentralized microgrid system because there are no trusted third parties such as control centers. Therefore, it is challenging to securely implement data aggregation and power dispatching in microgrids without any trusted third party. In this paper, by leveraging blockchain, we propose secure data aggregation based on homomorphic encryption and the PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus, and meanwhile we propose automatic power dispatching by utilizing the PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) algorithm and smart contracts. The security and performance analysis shows the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed solutions.

Yongdong Zhang

Papers

Blockchain Based Secure Data Aggregation and Distributed Power Dispatching for Microgrids