Privacy-preserving peer-to-peer energy trading in blockchain-enabled smart grids using functional encryption

Ye Byoul Son, Jong Hyuk Im, Hee Yong Kwon, Seong Yun Jeon, Mun Kyu Lee

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

64 Scopus citations

Abstract

Advanced smart grid technologies enable energy prosumers to trade surplus energy from their distributed renewable energy sources with other peer prosumers through peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading. In many previous works, P2P energy trading was facilitated by blockchain technology through blockchain's distributive nature and capacity to run smart contracts. However, the feature that all the data and transactions on a blockchain are visible to all blockchain nodes may significantly threaten the privacy of the parties participating in P2P energy trading. There are many previous works that have attempted to mitigate this problem. However, all these works focused on the anonymity of participants but did not protect the data and transactions. To address this issue, we propose a P2P energy trading system on a blockchain where all bids are encrypted and peer matching is performed on the encrypted bids by a functional encryption-based smart contract. The system guarantees that the information encoded in the encrypted bids is protected, but the peer matching transactions are performed by the nodes in a publicly verifiable manner through smart contracts. We verify the feasibility of the proposed system by implementing a prototype composed of smart meters, a distribution system operator (DSO) server, and private Ethereum blockchain.

Original languageEnglish
Article number1321
JournalEnergies
Volume16
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2 Mar 2020

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Keywords

  • Blockchain
  • Functional encryption
  • Peer-to-peer energy trading
  • Privacy protection
  • Smart grid

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