An Efficient Blockchain-Based Hierarchical Authentication Mechanism for Energy Trading in V2G Environment

Abstract

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) networks have emerged as a new technology in modern electric power transmission networks. It allows bi-directional flow of communication and electricity between electric vehicles (EVs) and the Smart Grid (SG), in order to provide more sophisticated energy trading. However, due to the involvement of a huge amount of trading data and the presence of untrusted entities in the visiting networks, the underlying V2G infrastructure suffers from various security and privacy challenges. Although, several solutions have been proposed in the literature to address these problems, issues like lack of mutual authentication and anonymity, incapability to protect against several attack vectors, generation of huge overhead, and dependency on centralized infrastructures make security and privacy issues even more challenging. To address the above mentioned problems, in this paper, we propose a blockchain oriented hierarchical authentication mechanism for rewarding EVs. The overall process is broadly classified into the following phases: 1) System Initialization, 2) Registration, 3) Hierarchical Mutual Authentication, and 4) Consensus; wherein blockchain's distributed ledger has been employed for transaction execution in distributed V2G environments while Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has been used for hierarchical authentication. The designed hierarchical authentication mechanism has been employed to preserve the anonymity of EVs and support mutual authentication between EVs, charging stations (CSs) and the central aggregator (CAG). Additionally, it also supports minimal communicational and computational overheads on resource constrained EVs. Further, formal security verification of the proposed scheme on widely accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool validates its safeness against different security attacks.

Cloud-Based Big Data Platform for Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G)

“…Furthermore, additional data, such as traffic information, could be used to improve further the prediction accuracy. Finally, the security of the V2G transactions could be improved using technology, such as blockchain, based on previous work [54][55][56].…”

Capacity Management of Hyperscale Data Centers Using Predictive Modelling

“…For a data center, energy efficiency can be considered as useful work performed by different subsystems. According to the Green Grid Association [16], PUE and Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE), which are shown by Equations (1) and (2), can help to better understand and improve the energy efficiency of existing data centers. This also helps to support smarter managerial decision making for improving data-center efficiency.…”

“…By 2020, ICT industries will account for 3.5% of global carbon emissions, which are predicted to grow by up to 14% by 2040 [1]. Data centers are becoming a predominant ICT industry due to the rapid growth of Big Data applications, the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, autonomous systems, Blockchain, and artificial intelligence (AI) [2,3]. In addition, it has been predicted that demand for data centers will rise exponentially by 2025, which would make data centers consume 33% of the total global ICT electricity consumption [4].…”

A Lightweight and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocol for Mobile Edge Computing

“…These protocols enable mutual verification of the communicating parties before the transmission of confidential and sensitive information. They also facilitate the key exchange mechanism for preserving confidentiality and privacy [5], [6].…”