259 research outputs found
Zone-Based Privacy-Preserving Billing for Local Energy Market Based on Multiparty Computation
This paper proposes a zone-based privacy-preserving billing protocol for
local energy markets that takes into account energy volume deviations of market
participants from their bids. Our protocol incorporates participants' locations
on the grid for splitting the deviations cost. The proposed billing model
employs multiparty computation so that the accurate calculation of individual
bills is performed in a decentralised and privacy-preserving manner. We also
present a security analysis as well as performance evaluations for different
security settings. The results show superiority of the honest-majority model to
the dishonest majority in terms of computational efficiency. They also show
that the billing can be executed for 5000 users in less than nine seconds in
the online phase for all security settings, demonstrating its feasibility to be
deployed in real local energy markets
Integration of Blockchain and Auction Models: A Survey, Some Applications, and Challenges
In recent years, blockchain has gained widespread attention as an emerging
technology for decentralization, transparency, and immutability in advancing
online activities over public networks. As an essential market process,
auctions have been well studied and applied in many business fields due to
their efficiency and contributions to fair trade. Complementary features
between blockchain and auction models trigger a great potential for research
and innovation. On the one hand, the decentralized nature of blockchain can
provide a trustworthy, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to manage the
auction process; on the other hand, auction models can be utilized to design
incentive and consensus protocols in blockchain architectures. These
opportunities have attracted enormous research and innovation activities in
both academia and industry; however, there is a lack of an in-depth review of
existing solutions and achievements. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive
state-of-the-art survey of these two research topics. We review the existing
solutions for integrating blockchain and auction models, with some
application-oriented taxonomies generated. Additionally, we highlight some open
research challenges and future directions towards integrated blockchain-auction
models
A Privacy-Preserving and Accountable Billing Protocol for Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Markets
This paper proposes a privacy-preserving and accountable billing (PA-Bill)
protocol for trading in peer-to-peer energy markets, addressing situations
where there may be discrepancies between the volume of energy committed and
delivered. Such discrepancies can lead to challenges in providing both privacy
and accountability while maintaining accurate billing. To overcome these
challenges, a universal cost splitting mechanism is proposed that prioritises
privacy and accountability. It leverages a homomorphic encryption cryptosystem
to provide privacy and employs blockchain technology to establish
accountability. A dispute resolution mechanism is also introduced to minimise
the occurrence of erroneous bill calculations while ensuring accountability and
non-repudiation throughout the billing process. Our evaluation demonstrates
that PA-Bill offers an effective billing mechanism that maintains privacy and
accountability in peer-to-peer energy markets utilising a semi-decentralised
approach.Comment: 6-pages, 1 Figure, Accepted for International Conference on Smart
Energy Systems and Technologies (SEST2023
When energy trading meets blockchain in electrical power system: The state of the art
With the rapid growth of renewable energy resources, energy trading has been shifting from the centralized manner to distributed manner. Blockchain, as a distributed public ledger technology, has been widely adopted in the design of new energy trading schemes. However, there are many challenging issues in blockchain-based energy trading, e.g., low efficiency, high transaction cost, and security and privacy issues. To tackle these challenges, many solutions have been proposed. In this survey, the blockchain-based energy trading in the electrical power system is thoroughly investigated. Firstly, the challenges in blockchain-based energy trading are identified and summarized. Then, the existing energy trading schemes are studied and classified into three categories based on their main focuses: energy transaction, consensus mechanism, and system optimization. Blockchain-based energy trading has been a popular research topic, new blockchain architectures, models and products are continually emerging to overcome the limitations of existing solutions, forming a virtuous circle. The internal combination of different blockchain types and the combination of blockchain with other technologies improve the blockchain-based energy trading system to better satisfy the practical requirements of modern power systems. However, there are still some problems to be solved, for example, the lack of regulatory system, environmental challenges and so on. In the future, we will strive for a better optimized structure and establish a comprehensive security assessment model for blockchain-based energy trading system.This research was funded by Beijing Natural Science Foundation (grant number 4182060).Scopu
SoK: Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in Finance
Recent years have seen the emergence of practical advanced cryptographic tools that not only protect data privacy and authenticity, but also allow for jointly processing data from different institutions without sacrificing privacy. The ability to do so has enabled implementations a number of traditional and decentralized financial applications that would have required sacrificing privacy or trusting a third party. The main catalyst of this revolution was the advent of decentralized cryptocurrencies that use public ledgers to register financial transactions, which must be verifiable by any third party, while keeping sensitive data private. Zero Knowledge (ZK) proofs rose to prominence as a solution to this challenge, allowing for the owner of sensitive data (e.g. the identities of users involved in an operation) to convince a third party verifier that a certain operation has been correctly executed without revealing said data. It quickly became clear that performing arbitrary computation on private data from multiple sources by means of secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) and related techniques allows for more powerful financial applications, also in traditional finance.
In this SoK, we categorize the main traditional and decentralized financial applications that can benefit from state-of-the-art Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and identify design patterns commonly used when applying PETs in the context of these applications. In particular, we consider the following classes of applications: 1. Identity Management, KYC & AML; and 2. Markets & Settlement; 3. Legal; and 4. Digital Asset Custody. We examine how ZK proofs, MPC and related PETs have been used to tackle the main security challenges in each of these applications. Moreover, we provide an assessment of the technological readiness of each PET in the context of different financial applications according to the availability of: theoretical feasibility results, preliminary benchmarks (in scientific papers) or benchmarks achieving real-world performance (in commercially deployed solutions). Finally, we propose future applications of PETs as Fintech solutions to currently unsolved issues. While we systematize financial applications of PETs at large, we focus mainly on those applications that require privacy preserving computation on data from multiple parties
Raziel: Private and Verifiable Smart Contracts on Blockchains
Raziel combines secure multi-party computation and proof-carrying code to
provide privacy, correctness and verifiability guarantees for smart contracts
on blockchains. Effectively solving DAO and Gyges attacks, this paper describes
an implementation and presents examples to demonstrate its practical viability
(e.g., private and verifiable crowdfundings and investment funds).
Additionally, we show how to use Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Proofs (i.e.,
Proof-Carrying Code certificates) to prove the validity of smart contracts to
third parties before their execution without revealing anything else. Finally,
we show how miners could get rewarded for generating pre-processing data for
secure multi-party computation.Comment: Support: cothority/ByzCoin/OmniLedge
On security and privacy of consensus-based protocols in blockchain and smart grid
In recent times, distributed consensus protocols have received widespread attention in the area of blockchain and smart grid. Consensus algorithms aim to solve an agreement problem among a set of nodes in a distributed environment. Participants in a blockchain use consensus algorithms to agree on data blocks containing an ordered set of transactions. Similarly, agents in the smart grid employ consensus to agree on specific values (e.g., energy output, market-clearing price, control parameters) in distributed energy management protocols.
This thesis focuses on the security and privacy aspects of a few popular consensus-based protocols in blockchain and smart grid. In the blockchain area, we analyze the consensus protocol of one of the most popular payment systems: Ripple. We show how the parameters chosen by the Ripple designers do not prevent the occurrence of forks in the system. Furthermore, we provide the conditions to prevent any fork in the Ripple network. In the smart grid area, we discuss the privacy issues in the Economic Dispatch (ED) optimization problem and some of its recent solutions using distributed consensus-based approaches. We analyze two state of the art consensus-based ED protocols from Yang et al. (2013) and Binetti et al. (2014). We show how these protocols leak private information about the participants. We propose privacy-preserving versions of these consensus-based ED protocols. In some cases, we also improve upon the communication cost
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