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.

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A tetR family transcriptional regulatory gene (SCO1712) was identified as a global antibiotic regulatory gene from a Streptomyces interspecies DNA microarray analysis. SCO1712 disruption in S treptomyces coelicolor not only upregulated antibiotic biosynthesis through pathway-specific regulators when a previously identified pleiotropic downregulatory wblA was expressed but also further stimulated antibiotic production in a wblA deletion mutant, implying that SCO1712 might encode a novel antibiotic downregulator.

Currently, an increasing number of smartphones are adopting fingerprint verification as a method to authenticate their users. Fingerprint verification is not only used to unlock these smartphones, but also used in financial applications such as online payment. Therefore, it is very crucial to secure the fingerprint verification mechanism for reliable services. In this paper, however, we identify a few vulnerabilities in one of the currently deployed smartphones equipped with fingerprint verification service by analyzing the service application. We demonstrate actual attacks via two proof-of-concept codes that exploit these vulnerabilities. By the first attack, a malicious application can obtain the fingerprint image of the owner of the victimized smartphone through message-based interprocess communication with the service application. In the second attack, an attacker can extract fingerprint features by decoding a file containing them in encrypted form. We also suggest a few possible countermeasures to prevent these attacks.

The development of smart meters that can frequently measure and report power consumption has enabledelectricity providers to offer various time-varying rates, including time-of-use and real-time pricing plans. High-resolution power consumption data, however, raise serious privacy concerns because sensitive information regarding an individual’s lifestyle can be revealed by analyzing these data. Although extensive research has been conducted to address these privacy concerns, previous approaches have reduced the quality of measured data. In this paper, we propose a new privacy-preserving electricity billing method that does not sacrifice data quality for privacy. The proposed method is based on the novel use of functional encryption. Experimental results on a prototype system using a real-world smart meter device and data prove the feasibility of the proposed method.