A Review of Cybersecurity Concerns for Transactive Energy Markets

Abstract

Advances in energy generation and distribution technology have created the need for new power management paradigms. Transactive energy markets are integrated software and hardware systems that enable optimized energy management and direct trading between prosumers. This literature review covers unresolved security and privacy vulnerabilities in the proposed implementations of such markets. We first performed a coarse search for such implementations. We then combed the resulting literature for references to privacy concerns, security vulnerabilities, and attacks that their system was either vulnerable to or sought to address. We did so with a particular focus on threats that were not mitigated by the use of blockchain technology, a commonly employed solution. Based on evidence from 28 peer-reviewed papers, we synthesized 14 categories of concerns and their proposed solutions. We found that there are some concerns that have been widely addressed, such as protecting trading history when using a public blockchain. Conversely, there were serious threats that are not sufficiently being considered. While a lack of real-world deployment has limited information about which attacks are most likely or feasible, there are clear areas of priority that we recommend to address going forward, including market attacks, false data injection attacks, single points of failure, energy usage data leakage, and privacy.

Cyclic Homomorphic Encryption Aggregation (CHEA)—A Novel Approach to Data Aggregation in the Smart Grid

“…A recent literature review that examined privacy concerns in various transactive energy market implementations found that, while steps were generally taken in TEM proposals to protect identifying information, energy usage data are often mishandled [7].…”

“…While it is not inherently identifying, many researchers believe it should fall under the category of protected private information [6]. This is due to the fact that this data can facilitate many malicious attacks on consumers, including profiling, trading pattern recognition, and malicious trading [7].…”

“…Decentralization: As discussed in [7] the trend in TEM development is towards decentralized applications. A decentralized solution for data aggregation supports this trend and confers the same benefits seen by turning other power management mechanisms into distributed applications.…”