BCACP-IoE: A Novel Blockchain-Based Security Access Control Protocol for Internet of Energy

Thanks to the development of information technology, our energy system is gradually becoming connected and intelligent. The deep integration of the mature Internet of Things and various fields of energy forms the Internet of Energy (IoE), which can make an important contribution to improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon dioxide emissions. However, the continuous deepening of information technology in IoE, it also brings a lot of network security problems, because the essence of IoE information exchange is wireless communication. Such network security problems may result in the disclosure of private information of the power user side (PUS) to other unauthorized parties, or in the acquisition of trade secrets of the power supply side (PSS) by competitors. Therefore, we need to develop a specific data access protocol to ensure the communication security of IoE. This paper proposes a blockchain-based access control protocol for IoE, namely “BCACP-IoE”. As most grid companies (GC) are run by governments, BCACP-IoE treats them as trusted entities and designs secure access protocols for PSS/PUS-GC communication. Meanwhile, we use Ripple, a vote-based blockchain consensus algorithm, to validate transactions and add them to the blockchain. Through various security analyses, we prove the security of the BCACP-IoE against different types of potential attacks. In addition, it also has lower communication and computing costs, and its performance is better than other existing schemes.

I. Introduction

With the development of renewable energy, electric vehicle, smart grid, and vehicle-to-network technologies, the existing energy industry is beginning to shift to distributed solutions [1], [2]. As a result, following smart grids, IoE has become a hot technology in the energy sector. However, due to its information characteristics, IoE will also bring many network security problems. In 2015, for example, A denial-of-service (DoS) attack on Ukraine's power grid left 225,000 people without electricity. In addition to the security of the grid itself, the private data of PUS and PSS should not be compromised with the operation of the IoE and should be reasonably protected. To protect the network security of the IoE, many scholars set up secure access protocols to prevent malicious users from accessing data by forging identities and forcibly attacking cryptography algorithms.