Jonatan Bergquist, Aron Laszka, Monika Sturm, Abhishek Dubey
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
As microgrids increasingly rely on decentralized energy trading, privacy and security become critical challenges. Existing blockchain solutions expose transaction patterns and identities, compromising user privacy. This work is innovative because it integrates multiple cryptographic approaches to provide communication anonymity and transaction-level privacy simultaneously, enabling practical privacy-preserving energy trading.
This paper addresses blockchain-based transactive energy systems and proposes privacy-preserving mechanisms for trading energy in distributed microgrids. The authors extend the PETra workflow to support communication and transaction anonymity using cryptographic techniques including garlic routing, ring signatures, and zero-knowledge proofs. The work demonstrates how IoT devices can trade energy while maintaining transaction privacy and avoiding identity linkage.
The paper presents a comprehensive survey of anonymity mechanisms applicable to blockchain-based microgrids and proposes specific solutions for PETra including onion routing for communication and ring signatures with zero-knowledge proofs for transactions. The authors demonstrate that their approach achieves transaction untraceability while maintaining verifiable trading records on the distributed ledger.
@inproceedings{Bergquist2017,
author = {Bergquist, Jonatan and Laszka, Aron and Sturm, Monika and Dubey, Abhishek},
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},
title = {On the design of communication and transaction anonymity in blockchain-based transactive microgrids},
year = {2017},
pages = {3:1--3:6},
abstract = {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.},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/middleware/BergquistLSD17},
category = {workshop},
contribution = {lead},
doi = {10.1145/3152824.3152827},
file = {:Bergquist2017-On_the_design_of_communication_and_transaction_anonymity_in_blockchain-based_transactive_microgrids.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {blockchain, transactive energy, microgrids, privacy, anonymity, ring signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, IoT, distributed ledger},
project = {transactive-energy,cps-middleware,cps-reliability},
tag = {decentralization,platform},
timestamp = {Tue, 06 Nov 2018 16:57:13 +0100},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3152824.3152827}
}