Blockchain Middleware for Multi-stakeholder Cyber physical systems
Blockchain Middleware for Multi-stakeholder Cyber physical systems
We are focusing on creating smart and connected community solutions, which provide participants the capability to not only exchange data and services in a decentralized and perhaps anonymous manner, but also provide them with the capability to preserve an immutable and auditable record of all transactions in the system. Blockchains form a key component of these platforms because they enable participants to reach a consensus on any state variable in the system, without relying on a trusted third party or trusting each other. Distributed consensus not only solves the trust issue, but also provides fault-tolerance since consensus is always reached on the correct state as long as the number of faulty nodes is below a threshold. However, it also introduces new assurance challenges such as privacy and correctness that must be addressed before protocols and implementations can live up to their potential. For instance, smart contracts deployed in practice are riddled with bugs and security vulnerabilities. Our group has been working on a number of projects in this interesting area, including work on transactive energy systems. Our research focuses on both the reusable middleware aspect as well as the foundational technologies required to ensure the rigor and correctness of the platform. We collaborate actively with Prof. Aron Lazka, University of Houston in this project. We are thankful to Siemens Corporate Technology and the National Science Foundation (NSF) for sponsoring our efforts. Specific Research activities are discussed below.
Transactive Energy Systems
To confront issues of privacy, efficiency, and safety in MSCPS, we have developed a platform for transactive energy system microgrids. The availability of distributed energy resources (DER) in communities have presented novel opportunities, as these resources are located closer to loads and can significantly reduce transmission losses and carbon emissions, relative to traditional power sources. However, their intermittent and variable nature often results in spikes in the overall demand on distribution system operators (DSO). To manage these challenges, there has been a surge of interest in building decentralized control schemes, where a pool of DERs combined with energy storage devices can exchange energy locally to smooth fluctuations in net demand. Building a decentralized market for transactive microgrids is challenging because even though a decentralized system provides resilience, it also must satisfy the requirements of privacy, efficiency, safety, and security, which are often in conflict with each other. As such, existing implementations of decentralized markets often focus on resilience and safety but compromise on privacy. Our platform, called TRANSAX, enables participants to trade in an energy futures market, which improves efficiency by finding feasible matches for energy trades, enabling DSOs to plan their energy needs better. TRANSAX provides privacy to participants by anonymizing their trading activity using a distributed mixing service, while also enforcing constraints that limit trading activity based on safety requirements, such as keeping planned energy flow below line capacity. We show that TRANSAX can satisfy the seemingly conflicting requirements of efficiency, safety, and privacy. We also provide an analysis of how much trading efficiency is lost. Trading efficiency is improved through the problem formulation which accounts for temporal flexibility, and system efficiency is improved using a hybrid-solver architecture. We also describe a testbed to run experiments and demonstrate its performance using simulation results. To demonstrate the feasibility of our platform, we perform experiments with dozens of embedded devices and energy production and consumption profiles from a real dataset.
We have also developed SolidWorx, a generic version of TRANSAX for enabling participants to trade in futures market. To improve efficiency we reduce the amount of computation that is performed using the smart contract by implementing a hybrid-solver pattern which relies on off-chain solvers to match the offers posted to the system. We only use the smart contract to verify that the solutions are valid.
MODiCuM
Recently, this work has been extended to create a market based edge computing service called MODiCuM. It enables trusted computations between mistrusting parties in the edge-cloud environment while minimizing the additional computation overhead. The existing efforts to construct such a platform, particularly those using blockchain, focus on ensuring global consensus on the results of the computation, but there are many cases where this is not required. Our platform, called MODiCuM, does not execute any of the outsourced computation as part of the smart contract, but instead uses the contract to hold the participants accountable. This effectively replaces the trusted third party required for general trusted two-party computation with the distributed ledger and smart contract.
Since smart contracts can perform any computation, they allow the development of decentralized applications, whose execution is safeguarded by the security properties of the underlying platform. Due to their unique advantages, blockchain based platforms are envisioned to have a wide range of applications, ranging from financial to the Internet-of-Things. However, the trustworthiness of the platform guarantees only that a smart contract is executed correctly, not that the code of the contract is correct. In fact, a large number of contracts deployed in practice suffer from software vulnerabilities, which are often introduced due to the semantic gap between the assumptions that contract writers make about the underlying execution semantics and the actual semantics of smart contracts. A recent automated analysis of 19,336 smart contracts deployed in practice found that 8,333 of them suffered from at least one security issue. Although this study was based on smart contracts deployed on the public Ethereum blockchain, the analyzed security issues were largely plat- form agnostic. Security vulnerabilities in smart contracts present a serious issue for two main reasons. Firstly, smart-contract bugs cannot be patched. By design, once a contract is deployed, its functionality cannot be altered even by its creator. Secondly, once a faulty or malicious transaction is recorded, it cannot be removed from the blockchain (“code is law” principle). The only way to roll back a transaction is by performing a hard fork of the blockchain, which requires consensus among the stakeholders and undermines the trustworthiness of the platform. In light of this, it is crucial to ensure that a smart contract is se- cure before deploying it and trusting it with significant amounts of cryptocurrency. To this end, we present the VeriSolid framework for the formal verification and generation of contracts that are specified using a transition-system based model with rigorous operational semantics. VeriSolid provides an end-to-end design framework, which combined with a Solidity code generator, allows the correct- by-design development of Ethereum smart contracts. To the best of our knowledge, VeriSolid is the first framework to promote a model- based, correctness-by-design approach for blockchain-based smart contracts. Properties established at any step of the VeriSolid design flow are preserved in the resulting smart contracts, guaranteeing their correctness. VeriSolid fully automates the process of verification and code generation, while enhancing usability by providing easy-to-use graphical editors for the specification of transition systems and natural-like language templates for the specification of formal properties. By performing verification early at design time, VeriSolid provides a cost-effective approach since fixing bugs later in the development process can be very expensive. Our verification approach can detect typical vulnerabilities, but it may also detect any violation of required properties. Since our tool applies verification at a high-level, it can provide meaningful feedback to the developer when a property is not satisfied, which would be much harder to do at bytecode level.
S. Eisele, T. Eghtesad, N. Troutman, A. Laszka, and A. Dubey, Mechanisms for Outsourcing Computation via a Decentralized Market, in 14TH ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event Based Systems, 2020.
@inproceedings{eisele2020mechanisms,
title = {Mechanisms for Outsourcing Computation via a Decentralized Market},
author = {Eisele, Scott and Eghtesad, Taha and Troutman, Nicholas and Laszka, Aron and Dubey, Abhishek},
year = {2020},
booktitle = {14TH ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event Based Systems},
keywords = {transactive},
category = {selectiveconference}
}
As the number of personal computing and IoT devices grows rapidly, so does the amount of computational power that is available at the edge. Since many of these devices are often idle, there is a vast amount of computational power that is currently untapped, and which could be used for outsourcing computation. Existing solutions for harnessing this power, such as volunteer computing (e.g., BOINC), are centralized platforms in which a single organization or company can control participation and pricing. By contrast, an open market of computational resources, where resource owners and resource users trade directly with each other, could lead to greater participation and more competitive pricing. To provide an open market, we introduce MODiCuM, a decentralized system for outsourcing computation. MODiCuM deters participants from misbehaving-which is a key problem in decentralized systems-by resolving disputes via dedicated mediators and by imposing enforceable fines. However, unlike other decentralized outsourcing solutions, MODiCuM minimizes computational overhead since it does not require global trust in mediation results. We provide analytical results proving that MODiCuM can deter misbehavior, and we evaluate the overhead of MODiCuM using experimental results based on an implementation of our platform.</p>
S. Eisele, T. Eghtesad, K. Campanelli, P. Agrawal, A. Laszka, and A. Dubey, Safe and Private Forward-Trading Platform for Transactive Microgrids, Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, 2020.
@article{eisele2020Safe,
title = {{Safe and Private Forward-Trading Platform for Transactive Microgrids}},
author = {Eisele, Scott and Eghtesad, Taha and Campanelli, Keegan and Agrawal, Prakhar and Laszka, Aron and Dubey, Abhishek},
journal = {Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems},
year = {2020}
}
Power grids are evolving at an unprecedented pace due to the rapid growth of distributed energy resources (DER) in communities. These resources are very different from traditional power sources as they are located closer to loads and thus can significantly reduce transmission losses and carbon emissions. However, their intermittent and variable nature often results in spikes in the overall demand on distribution system operators (DSO). To manage these challenges, there has been a surge of interest in building decentralized control schemes, where a pool of DERs combined with energy storage devices can exchange energy locally to smooth fluctuations in net demand. Building a decentralized market for transactive microgrids is challenging because even though a decentralized system provides resilience, it also must satisfy requirements like privacy, efficiency, safety, and security, which are often in conflict with each other. As such, existing implementations of decentralized markets often focus on resilience and safety but compromise on privacy. In this paper, we describe our platform, called TRANSAX, which enables participants to trade in an energy futures market, which improves efficiency by finding feasible matches for energy trades, enabling DSOs to plan their energy needs better. TRANSAX provides privacy to participants by anonymizing their trading activity using a distributed mixing service, while also enforcing constraints that limit trading activity based on safety requirements, such as keeping planned energy flow below line capacity. We show that TRANSAX can satisfy the seemingly conflicting requirements of efficiency, safety, and privacy. We also provide an analysis of how much trading efficiency is lost. Trading efficiency is improved through the problem formulation which accounts for temporal flexibility, and system efficiency is improved using a hybrid-solver architecture. Finally, we describe a testbed to run experiments and demonstrate its performance using simulation results.</p>
S. Eisele et al., Blockchains for Transactive Energy Systems: Opportunities, Challenges, and Approaches, IEEE Computer, 2020.
@article{eisele2020Blockchains,
author = {Eisele, Scott and Barreto, Carlos and Dubey, Abhishek and Koutsoukos, Xenofon and Eghtesad, Taha and Laszka, Aron and Mavridou, Anastasia},
title = {Blockchains for Transactive Energy Systems: Opportunities, Challenges, and Approaches},
journal = {IEEE Computer},
year = {2020}
}
The emergence of blockchains and smart contracts have renewed interest in electrical cyber-physical systems, especially in the area of transactive energy systems. However, despite recent advances, there remain significant challenges that impede the practical adoption of blockchains in transactive energy systems, which include implementing complex market mechanisms in smart contracts, ensuring safety of the power system, and protecting residential consumers’ privacy. To address these challenges, we present TRANSAX, a blockchain-based transactive energy system that provides an efficient, safe, and privacy-preserving market built on smart contracts. Implementation and deployment of TRANSAX in a verifiably correct and efficient way is based on VeriSolid, a framework for the correct-by-construction development of smart contracts, and RIAPS, a middleware for resilient distributed power systems</p>
C. Barreto, T. Eghtesad, S. Eisele, A. Laszka, A. Dubey, and X. Koutsoukos, Cyber-Attacks and Mitigation in Blockchain Based Transactive Energy Systems, in 3rd IEEE International Conference on IndustrialCyber-Physical Systems (ICPS 2020), 2020.
@inproceedings{barretocyber2020,
author = {Barreto, Carlos and Eghtesad, Taha and Eisele, Scott and Laszka, Aron and Dubey, Abhishek and Koutsoukos, Xenofon},
title = {Cyber-Attacks and Mitigation in Blockchain Based Transactive Energy Systems},
booktitle = {3rd IEEE International Conference on IndustrialCyber-Physical Systems (ICPS 2020)},
year = {2020},
category = {selectiveconference},
keywords = {transactive},
project = {cps-reliability}
}
Power grids are undergoing major changes due to the rapid adoption of intermittent renewable energy resources and the increased availability of energy storage devices. These trends drive smart-grid operators to envision a future where peer-to-peer energy trading occurs within microgrids, leading to the development of Transactive Energy Systems. Blockchains have garnered significant interest from both academia and industry for their potential application in decentralized TES, in large part due to their high level of resilience. In this paper, we introduce a novel class of attacks against blockchain based TES, which target the gateways that connect market participants to the system. We introduce a general model of blockchain based TES and study multiple threat models and attack strategies. We also demonstrate the impact of these attacks using a testbed based on GridLAB-D and a private Ethereum network. Finally, we study how to mitigate these attack.</p>
A. Laszka, A. Mavridou, S. Eisele, E. Statchtiari, and A. Dubey, VeriSolid for TRANSAX: Correct-by-Design Ethereum Smart Contracts for Energy Trading, in First International Summer School on Security and Privacy for Blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technologies, BDLT 2019, Vienna, Austria, 2019.
@inproceedings{LaszkaVerisolid2019,
author = {Laszka, Aron and Mavridou, Anastasia and Eisele, Scott and Statchtiari, Emmanouela and Dubey, Abhishek},
title = {VeriSolid for TRANSAX: Correct-by-Design Ethereum Smart Contracts for Energy Trading},
booktitle = {First International Summer School on Security and Privacy for Blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technologies, BDLT 2019, Vienna, Austria},
year = {2019},
month = sep,
category = {workshop},
file = {:LaszkaVerisolid2019Poster.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {blockchain, transactive},
project = {cps-blockchains,transactive-energy}
}
The adoption of blockchain based platforms is rising rapidly. Their popularity is explained by their ability to maintain a distributed public ledger, providing reliability, integrity, and auditability with- out a trusted entity. Recent platforms, e.g., Ethereum, also act as distributed computing platforms and enable the creation of smart contracts, i.e., software code that runs on the platform and automatically executes and enforces the terms of a contract. Since smart contracts can perform any computation, they allow the develop- ment of decentralized applications, whose execution is safeguarded by the security properties of the underlying platform. Due to their unique advantages, blockchain based platforms are envisioned to have a wide range of applications, ranging from financial to the Internet-of-Things.
However, the trustworthiness of the platform guarantees only that a smart contract is executed correctly, not that the code of the contract is correct. In fact, a large number of contracts deployed in practice suffer from software vulnerabilities, which are often introduced due to the semantic gap between the assumptions that contract writers make about the underlying
execution semantics and the actual semantics of smart contracts. A recent automated analysis of 19,336 smart contracts deployed in practice found that 8,333 of them suffered from at least one security issue. Although this study was based on smart contracts deployed on the public Ethereum blockchain, the analyzed security issues were largely plat- form agnostic.
Security vulnerabilities in smart contracts present a serious issue for two main reasons. Firstly, smart-contract bugs cannot be patched. By design, once a contract is deployed, its func- tionality cannot be altered even by its creator. Secondly, once a faulty or malicious transaction is recorded, it cannot be removed from the blockchain (“code is law” principle). The only way to roll back a transaction is by performing a hard fork of the blockchain, which requires consensus among the stakeholders and undermines the trustworthiness of the platform. In light of this, it is crucial to ensure that a smart contract is se- cure before deploying it and trusting it with significant amounts of cryptocurrency. To this end, we present the VeriSolid framework for the formal verification and generation of contracts that are specified using a transition-system based model with rigorous operational semantics. VeriSolid provides an end-to-end design framework, which combined with a Solidity code generator, allows the correct- by-design development of Ethereum smart contracts. To the best of our knowledge, VeriSolid is the first framework to promote a model- based, correctness-by-design approach for
blockchain-based smart contracts. Properties established at any step of the VeriSolid design flow are preserved in the resulting smart contracts, guaranteeing their correctness. VeriSolid fully automates the process of verifica- tion and code generation, while enhancing usability by providing easy-to-use graphical editors for the specification of transition sys- tems and natural-like language templates
for the specification of formal properties. By performing verification early at design time, VeriSolid provides a cost-effective approach since fixing bugs later in the development process can be very expensive. Our verification approach can detect typical vulnerabilities, but it may also detect any violation of required properties. Since our tool applies verifi- cation at a high-level, it can provide meaningful
feedback to the developer when a property is not satisfied, which would be much harder to do at bytecode level. We present the application of VeriSolid on smart contracts used in Smart Energy Systems such as transactive energy platforms. In particular, we used VeriSolid to design and generate the smart contract that serves as the core of the TRANSAX blockchain-based platform for trading energy futures.
The designed smart contract allows energy producers and consumers to post offers for selling and buying energy. Since optimally matching selling offers with buying offers can be very expensive computationally, the contract relies on external solvers to compute and submit solutions to the matching problem, which are then checked by the contract.
Using VeriSolid, we defined a set of safety properties and we were able to detect bugs after performing analysis with the NuSMV model checker.</p>
M. A. Walker, D. C. Schmidt, and A. Dubey, Chapter Six - Testing at scale of IoT blockchain applications, in Advances in Computers, vol. 115, Oreilly, 2019, pp. 155–179.
@inbook{Walker2019,
pages = {155--179},
title = {Chapter Six - Testing at scale of IoT blockchain applications},
publisher = {Oreilly},
year = {2019},
author = {Walker, Michael A. and Schmidt, Douglas C. and Dubey, Abhishek},
volume = {115},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/journals/ac/WalkerSD19},
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keywords = {cps-blockchains, blockchain},
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timestamp = {Tue, 12 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.adcom.2019.07.008}
}
Abstract Due to the ever-increasing adaptation of Blockchain technologies in the private, public, and business domains, both the use of Distributed Systems and the increased demand for their reliability has exploded recently, especially with their desired integration with Internet-of-Things devices. This has resulted in a lot of work being done in the fields of distributed system analysis and design, specifically in the areas of blockchain smart contract design and formal verification. However, the focus on formal verification methodologies has meant that less attention has been given toward more traditional testing methodologies, such as unit testing and integration testing. This includes a lack of full support by most, if not all, the major blockchain implementations for testing at scale, except on fully public test networks. This has several drawbacks, such as: (1) The inability to do repeatable testing under identical scenarios, (2) reliance upon public mining of blocks, which introduces unreasonable amounts of delay for a test driven development scenario that a private network could reduce or eliminate, and (3) the inability to design scenarios where parts of the network go down. In this chapter we discuss design, testing methodologies, and tools to allow Testing at Scale of IoT Blockchain Applications.</p>
P. Zhang, D. C. Schmidt, J. White, and A. Dubey, Chapter Seven - Consensus mechanisms and information security technologies, in Advances in Computers, vol. 115, Oreilly, 2019, pp. 181–209.
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pages = {181--209},
title = {Chapter Seven - Consensus mechanisms and information security technologies},
publisher = {Oreilly},
year = {2019},
author = {Zhang, Peng and Schmidt, Douglas C. and White, Jules and Dubey, Abhishek},
volume = {115},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/journals/ac/0034SWD19},
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timestamp = {Tue, 12 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.adcom.2019.05.001}
}
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) helps maintain and distribute predefined types of information and data in a decentralized manner. It removes the reliance on a third-party intermediary, while securing information exchange and creating shared truth via transaction records that are hard to tamper with. The successful operation of DLT stems largely from two computer science technologies: consensus mechanisms and information security protocols. Consensus mechanisms, such as Proof of Work (PoW) and Raft, ensure that the DLT network collectively agrees on contents stored in the ledger. Information security protocols, such as encryption and hashing, protect data integrity and safeguard data against unauthorized access.
The most popular incarnation of DLT has been used in cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, through public blockchains, which requires the application of more robust consensus protocols across the entire network. An example is PoW, which has been employed by Bitcoin, but which is also highly energy inefficient. Other forms of DLT include consortium and private blockchains where networks are configured within federated entities or a single organization, in which case less energy intensive consensus protocols (such as Raft) would suffice. This chapter surveys existing consensus mechanisms and information security technologies used in DLT.</p>
Y. Zhang, S. Eisele, A. Dubey, A. Laszka, and A. K. Srivastava, Cyber-Physical Simulation Platform for Security Assessment of Transactive Energy Systems, in 7th Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems, MSCPES@CPSIoTWeek 2019, Montreal, QC, Canada, 2019, pp. 1–6.
@inproceedings{Zhang2019a,
author = {Zhang, Yue and Eisele, Scott and Dubey, Abhishek and Laszka, Aron and Srivastava, Anurag K.},
title = {Cyber-Physical Simulation Platform for Security Assessment of Transactive Energy Systems},
booktitle = {7th Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems, MSCPES@CPSIoTWeek 2019, Montreal, QC, Canada},
year = {2019},
pages = {1--6},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/cpsweek/ZhangEDLS19},
category = {workshop},
doi = {10.1109/MSCPES.2019.8738802},
file = {:Zhang2019a-Cyber_Physical_Simulation_Platform_for_Security_Assessment_of_Transactive_Energy_Systems.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {transactive},
project = {transactive-energy,cps-reliability},
timestamp = {Wed, 16 Oct 2019 14:14:56 +0200},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/MSCPES.2019.8738802}
}
Transactive energy systems (TES) are emerging as a transformative solution for the problems that distribution system operators face due to an increase in the use of distributed energy resources and rapid growth in scalability of managing active distribution system (ADS). On the one hand, these changes pose a decentralized power system control problem, requiring strategic control to maintain reliability and resiliency for the community and for the utility. On the other hand, they require robust financial markets while allowing participation from diverse prosumers. To support the computing and flexibility requirements of TES while preserving privacy and security, distributed software platforms are required. In this paper, we enable the study and analysis of security concerns by developing Transactive Energy Security Simulation Testbed (TESST), a TES testbed for simulating various cyber attacks. In this work, the testbed is used for TES simulation with centralized clearing market, highlighting weaknesses in a centralized system. Additionally, we present a blockchain enabled decentralized market solution supported by distributed computing for TES, which on one hand can alleviate some of the problems that we identify, but on the other hand, may introduce newer issues. Future study of these differing paradigms is necessary and will continue as we develop our security simulation testbed.</p>
S. Eisele, P. Ghosh, K. Campanelli, A. Dubey, and G. Karsai, Demo: Transactive Energy Application with RIAPS, in IEEE 22nd International Symposium on Real-Time Distributed Computing, ISORC 2019, Valencia, Spain, May 7-9, 2019, 2019, pp. 85–86.
@inproceedings{Eisele2019,
author = {Eisele, Scott and Ghosh, Purboday and Campanelli, Keegan and Dubey, Abhishek and Karsai, Gabor},
title = {Demo: Transactive Energy Application with {RIAPS}},
booktitle = {{IEEE} 22nd International Symposium on Real-Time Distributed Computing, {ISORC} 2019, Valencia, Spain, May 7-9, 2019},
year = {2019},
pages = {85--86},
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timestamp = {Wed, 16 Oct 2019 14:14:53 +0200},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ISORC.2019.00024}
}
The modern electric grid is a complex, decentralized cyber-physical system requiring higher-level control techniques to balance the demand and supply of energy to optimize the overall energy usage. The concept of Transactive Energy utilizes distributed system principle to address this challenge. In this demonstration we show the usage of the distributed application management platform RIAPS in the implementation of one such Transactive Energy approach to control elements of a power system, which runs as a a simulation using the Gridlab-d simulation solver.</p>
A. Laszka, S. Eisele, A. Dubey, G. Karsai, and K. Kvaternik, TRANSAX: A Blockchain-Based Decentralized Forward-Trading Energy Exchanged for Transactive Microgrids, in 24th IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, ICPADS 2018, Singapore, December 11-13, 2018, 2018, pp. 918–927.
@inproceedings{Laszka2018,
author = {Laszka, Aron and Eisele, Scott and Dubey, Abhishek and Karsai, Gabor and Kvaternik, Karla},
title = {{TRANSAX:} {A} Blockchain-Based Decentralized Forward-Trading Energy Exchanged for Transactive Microgrids},
booktitle = {24th {IEEE} International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, {ICPADS} 2018, Singapore, December 11-13, 2018},
year = {2018},
pages = {918--927},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/icpads/LaszkaEDKK18},
category = {selectiveconference},
doi = {10.1109/PADSW.2018.8645001},
file = {:Laszka2018-TRANSAX_A_Blockchain-Based_Decentralized_Forward-Trading_Energy_Exchanged_for_Transactive_Microgrids.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {transactive, blockchain},
project = {transactive-energy,cps-blockchains},
timestamp = {Wed, 16 Oct 2019 14:14:56 +0200},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/PADSW.2018.8645001}
}
Power grids are undergoing major changes due to rapid growth in renewable energy and improvements in battery technology. Prompted by the increasing complexity of power systems, decentralized IoT solutions are emerging, which arrange local communities into transactive microgrids. The core functionality of these solutions is to provide mechanisms for matching producers with consumers while ensuring system safety. However, there are multiple challenges that these solutions still face: privacy, trust, and resilience. The privacy challenge arises because the time series of production and consumption data for each participant is sensitive and may be used to infer personal information. Trust is an issue because a producer or consumer can renege on the promised energy transfer. Providing resilience is challenging due to the possibility of failures in the infrastructure that is required to support these market based solutions. In this paper, we develop a rigorous solution for transactive microgrids that addresses all three challenges by providing an innovative combination of MILP solvers, smart contracts, and publish-subscribe middleware within a framework of a novel distributed application platform, called Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart Grid. Towards this purpose, we describe the key architectural concepts, including fault tolerance, and show the trade-off between market efficiency and resource requirements.</p>
S. Eisele, A. Laszka, A. Mavridou, and A. Dubey, SolidWorx: A Resilient and Trustworthy Transactive Platform for Smart and Connected Communities, in IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things and Blockchains, 2018, pp. 1263–1272.
@inproceedings{Eisele2018,
author = {Eisele, Scott and Laszka, Aron and Mavridou, Anastasia and Dubey, Abhishek},
title = {SolidWorx: {A} Resilient and Trustworthy Transactive Platform for Smart and Connected Communities},
booktitle = {{IEEE} International Conference on Internet of Things and Blockchains},
year = {2018},
pages = {1263--1272},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/ithings/EiseleLMD18},
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doi = {10.1109/Cybermatics\_2018.2018.00221},
file = {:Eisele2018-SolidWorx_A_Resilient_and_Trustworthy_Transactive_Platform_for_Smart_and_Connected_Communities.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {blockchain, transactive},
project = {cps-blockchains,transactive-energy},
timestamp = {Wed, 16 Oct 2019 14:14:56 +0200},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/Cybermatics\_2018.2018.00221}
}
Internet of Things and data sciences are fueling the development of innovative solutions for various applications in Smart and Connected Communities (SCC). These applications provide participants with the capability to exchange not only data but also resources, which raises the concerns of integrity, trust, and above all the need for fair and optimal solutions to the problem of resource allocation. This exchange of information and resources leads to a problem where the stakeholders of the system may have limited trust in each other. Thus, collaboratively reaching consensus on when, how, and who should access certain resources becomes problematic. This paper presents SolidWorx, a blockchain-based platform that provides key mechanisms required for arbitrating resource consumption across different SCC applications in a domain-agnostic manner. For example, it introduces and implements a hybrid-solver pattern, where complex optimization computation is handled off-blockchain while solution validation is performed by a smart contract. To ensure correctness, the smart contract of SolidWorx is generated and verified using a model-based approach.</p>
S. Eisele, A. Dubey, G. Karsai, and S. Lukic, Transactive energy demo with RIAPS platform, in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems, ICCPS 2017, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, April 18-20, 2017, 2017, p. 91.
@inproceedings{Eisele2017a,
author = {Eisele, Scott and Dubey, Abhishek and Karsai, Gabor and Lukic, Srdjan},
title = {Transactive energy demo with {RIAPS} platform},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems, {ICCPS} 2017, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, April 18-20, 2017},
year = {2017},
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keywords = {transactive},
project = {cps-reliability,cps-middleware,transactive-energy},
timestamp = {Wed, 16 Oct 2019 14:14:57 +0200},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3055004.3064845}
}
This work presents a platform for decentralized distributed computing called Resilient Information Architecture for the Smart Grid (RIAPS) through a transactional energy and a traffic application.</p>
A. Laszka, A. Dubey, M. Walker, and D. C. Schmidt, Providing privacy, safety, and security in IoT-based transactive energy systems using distributed ledgers, in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on the Internet of Things, IOT 2017, Linz, Austria, October 22-25, 2017, 2017, pp. 13:1–13:8.
@inproceedings{Laszka2017,
author = {Laszka, Aron and Dubey, Abhishek and Walker, Michael and Schmidt, Douglas C.},
title = {Providing privacy, safety, and security in IoT-based transactive energy systems using distributed ledgers},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on the Internet of Things, {IOT} 2017, Linz, Austria, October 22-25, 2017},
year = {2017},
pages = {13:1--13:8},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/iot/LaszkaDWS17},
category = {selectiveconference},
doi = {10.1145/3131542.3131562},
file = {:Laszka2017-Providing_privacy_safety_and_security_in_IoT-based_transactive_energy_systems_using_distributed_ledgers.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {transactive, blockchain},
project = {cps-reliability,cps-blockchains,transactive-energy},
timestamp = {Tue, 12 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3131542.3131562}
}
Power grids are undergoing major changes due to rapid growth in renewable energy resources and improvements in battery technology. While these changes enhance sustainability and efficiency, they also create significant management challenges as the complexity of power systems increases. To tackle these challenges, decentralized Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions are emerging, which arrange local communities into transactive microgrids. Within a transactive microgrid, “prosumers” (i.e., consumers with energy generation and storage capabilities) can trade energy with each other, thereby smoothing the load on the main grid using local supply. It is hard, however, to provide security, safety, and privacy in a decentralized and transactive energy system. On the one hand, prosumers’ personal information must be protected from their trade partners and the system operator. On the other hand, the system must be protected from careless or malicious trading, which could destabilize the entire grid. This paper describes Privacypreserving Energy Transactions (PETra), which is a secure and safe solution for transactive microgrids that enables consumers to trade energy without sacrificing their privacy. PETra builds on distributed ledgers, such as blockchains, and provides anonymity for communication, bidding, and trading.</p>
S. Eisele, I. Madari, A. Dubey, and G. Karsai, RIAPS: Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Decentralized Smart Systems, in 20th IEEE International Symposium on Real-Time Distributed Computing, ISORC 2017, Toronto, ON, Canada, May 16-18, 2017, 2017, pp. 125–132.
@inproceedings{Eisele2017b,
author = {Eisele, Scott and Madari, Istv{\'{a}}n and Dubey, Abhishek and Karsai, Gabor},
title = {{RIAPS:} Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Decentralized Smart Systems},
booktitle = {20th {IEEE} International Symposium on Real-Time Distributed Computing, {ISORC} 2017, Toronto, ON, Canada, May 16-18, 2017},
year = {2017},
pages = {125--132},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/isorc/EiseleMDK17},
category = {selectiveconference},
doi = {10.1109/ISORC.2017.22},
file = {:Eisele2017b-RIAPS_Resilient_Information_Architecture_Platform_for_Decentralized_Smart_Systems.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {middleware},
project = {smart-transit,smart-cities},
timestamp = {Wed, 16 Oct 2019 14:14:53 +0200},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ISORC.2017.22}
}
The emerging Fog Computing paradigm provides an additional computational layer that enables new capabilities in real-time data-driven applications. This is especially interesting in the domain of Smart Grid as the boundaries between traditional generation, distribution, and consumer roles are blurring. This is a reflection of the ongoing trend of intelligence distribution in Smart Systems. In this paper, we briefly describe a component-based decentralized software platform called Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart Systems (RIAPS) which provides an infrastructure for such systems. We briefly describe some initial applications built using this platform. Then, we focus on the design and integration choices for a resilient Discovery Manager service that is a critical component of this infrastructure. The service allows applications to discover each other, work collaboratively, and ensure the stability of the Smart System.</p>
J. Bergquist, A. Laszka, M. Sturm, and A. Dubey, On the design of communication and transaction anonymity in blockchain-based transactive microgrids, in Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Scalable and Resilient Infrastructures for Distributed Ledgers, SERIAL@Middleware 2017, Las Vegas, NV, USA, December 11-15, 2017, 2017, pp. 3:1–3:6.
@inproceedings{Bergquist2017,
author = {Bergquist, Jonatan and Laszka, Aron and Sturm, Monika and Dubey, Abhishek},
title = {On the design of communication and transaction anonymity in blockchain-based transactive microgrids},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Scalable and Resilient Infrastructures for Distributed Ledgers, SERIAL@Middleware 2017, Las Vegas, NV, USA, December 11-15, 2017},
year = {2017},
pages = {3:1--3:6},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/middleware/BergquistLSD17},
category = {workshop},
doi = {10.1145/3152824.3152827},
file = {:Bergquist2017-On_the_design_of_communication_and_transaction_anonymity_in_blockchain-based_transactive_microgrids.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {transactive},
project = {transactive-energy,cps-middleware,cps-reliability},
timestamp = {Tue, 06 Nov 2018 16:57:13 +0100},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3152824.3152827}
}
Transactive microgrids are emerging as a transformative solution for the problems faced by distribution system operators due to an increase in the use of distributed energy resources and a rapid acceleration in renewable energy generation, such as wind and solar power. Distributed ledgers have recently found widespread interest in this domain due to their ability to provide transactional integrity across decentralized computing nodes. However, the existing state of the art has not focused on the privacy preservation requirement of these energy systems – the transaction level data can provide much greater insights into a prosumer’s behavior compared to smart meter data. There are specific safety requirements in transactive microgrids to ensure the stability of the grid and to control the load. To fulfil these requirements, the distribution system operator needs transaction information from the grid, which poses a further challenge to the privacy-goals. This problem is made worse by requirement for off-blockchain communication in these networks. In this paper, we extend a recently developed trading workflow called PETra and describe our solution for communication and transactional anonymity.</p>
M. A. Walker, A. Dubey, A. Laszka, and D. C. Schmidt, PlaTIBART: a platform for transactive IoT blockchain applications with repeatable testing, in Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Middleware and Applications for the Internet of Things, M4IoT@Middleware 2017, Las Vegas, NV, USA, December 11, 2017, 2017, pp. 17–22.
@inproceedings{Walker2017,
author = {Walker, Michael A. and Dubey, Abhishek and Laszka, Aron and Schmidt, Douglas C.},
title = {PlaTIBART: a platform for transactive IoT blockchain applications with repeatable testing},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Middleware and Applications for the Internet of Things, M4IoT@Middleware 2017, Las Vegas, NV, USA, December 11, 2017},
year = {2017},
pages = {17--22},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/middleware/WalkerDLS17},
category = {workshop},
doi = {10.1145/3152141.3152392},
file = {:Walker2017-PlaTIBART_a_platform_for_transactive_IoT_blockchain_applications_with_repeatable_testing.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {blockchain},
project = {transactive-energy,cps-middleware,cps-reliability},
timestamp = {Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0100},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3152141.3152392}
}
With the advent of blockchain-enabled IoT applications, there is an increased need for related software patterns, middleware concepts, and testing practices to ensure adequate quality and productivity. IoT and blockchain each provide different design goals, concepts, and practices that must be integrated, including the distributed actor model and fault tolerance from IoT and transactive information integrity over untrustworthy sources from blockchain. Both IoT and blockchain are emerging technologies and both lack codified patterns and practices for development of applications when combined. This paper describes PlaTIBART, which is a platform for transactive IoT blockchain applications with repeatable testing that combines the Actor pattern (which is a commonly used model of computation in IoT) together with a custom Domain Specific Language (DSL) and test network management tools. We show how PlaTIBART has been applied to develop, test, and analyze fault-tolerant IoT blockchain applications.</p>