Blockchain and Demand Response: Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Energy Transactions Privacy

Cioara

IEEE Open J. Comput. Soc.

et al. 2021

Self Cite

102

In the context of COVID-19 pandemic, the rapid roll-out of a vaccine and the implementation of a worldwide immunization campaign is critical, but its success will depend on the availability of an operational and transparent distribution chain that can be audited by all relevant stakeholders. In this paper, we discuss how blockchain technology can help in several aspects of COVID-19 vaccination scheme. We present a system in which blockchain technology is used to guaranty data integrity and immutability of beneficiary registration for vaccination, avoiding identity thefts and impersonations. Smart contracts are defined to monitor and track the proper vaccine distribution conditions against the safe handling rules defined by vaccine producers enabling the awareness of all network peers. For vaccine administration, a transparent and tamper-proof solution for side effects self-reporting is provided considering beneficiary and administrated vaccine association. A prototype was implemented using the Ethereum test network, Ropsten, considering the COVID-19 vaccine distribution conditions. The results obtained for each onchain operation can be checked and validated on the Etherscan. In terms of throughput and scalability, the proposed blockchain system shows promising results while the estimated cost in terms of gas for vaccination scenario based on real data remains within reasonable limits.

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blockchain Platform For COVID-19 Vaccine Supply Management

Cioara

IEEE Open J. Comput. Soc.

et al. 2021

Self Cite

102

“…Finally, the proposed method is suitable not only for remote biometric verification systems but also for any FE-based privacy-preserving applications where the evaluated function is an inner product and one of the two inputs of the inner product is entered offline [ 35 , 36 ]. Furthermore, the proposed method can be applied not only to FE-based systems but also to the other systems involving inner-pairing products, such as non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs [ 37 , 38 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The more times the pairing is called, the more gain is obtained in the execution time, at the small expense of memory to store the precomputed elements. Recently, the pairing operations are being adopted as a crucial operation for many applications, such as privacy-preserving applications [ 35 , 36 ] and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs [ 37 , 38 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acceleration of Inner-Pairing Product Operation for Secure Biometric Verification

Jeon

Lee

2021

Sensors

With the recent advances in mobile technologies, biometric verification is being adopted in many smart devices as a means for authenticating their owners. As biometric data leakage may cause stringent privacy issues, many proposals have been offered to guarantee the security of stored biometric data, i.e., biometric template. One of the most promising solutions is the use of a remote server that stores the template in an encrypted form and performs a biometric comparison on the ciphertext domain, using recently proposed functional encryption (FE) techniques. However, the drawback of this approach is that considerable computation is required for the inner-pairing product operation used for the decryption procedure of the underlying FE, which is performed in the authentication phase. In this paper, we propose an enhanced method to accelerate the inner-pairing product computation and apply it to expedite the decryption operation of FE and for faster remote biometric verification. The following two important observations are the basis for our improvement—one of the two arguments for the decryption operation does not frequently change over authentication sessions, and we only need to evaluate the product of multiple pairings, rather than individual pairings. From the results of our experiments, the proposed method reduces the time required to compute an inner-pairing product by 30.7%, compared to the previous best method. With this improvement, the time required for biometric verification is expected to decrease by up to 10.0%, compared to a naive method.

IEICE Trans. Fundamentals

“…For EMSs, several results have been obtained (see, e.g., [13], [22], [23]). For also DR, several results have been obtained (see, e.g., [14], [24]). However, to the best of our knowledge, applications of a blockchain to a distributed EMS with DR have not been studied.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Blockchain-Based Optimization of Distributed Energy Management Systems with Real-Time Demand Response

Ogawa

Kobayashi

Yamashita

2022

Design of distributed energy management systems composed of several agents such as factories and buildings is important for realizing smart cities. In addition, demand response for saving the power consumption is also important. In this paper, we propose a design method of distributed energy management systems with real-time demand response, in which both electrical energy and thermal energy are considered. Here, we use ADMM (Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers), which is well known as one of the powerful methods in distributed optimization. In the proposed method, demand response is performed in real-time, based on the difference between the planned demand and the actual value. Furthermore, utilizing a blockchain is also discussed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is presented by a numerical example. The importance of introducing a blockchain is pointed out by presenting the adverse effect of tampering the actual value.