Blockchain for Future Smart Grid: A Comprehensive Survey

The concept of smart grid has been introduced as a new vision of the conventional power grid to figure out an efficient way of integrating green and renewable energy technologies. In this way, Internet-connected smart grid, also called energy Internet, is also emerging as an innovative approach to ensure the energy from anywhere at any time. The ultimate goal of these developments is to build a sustainable society. However, integrating and coordinating a large number of growing connections can be a challenging issue for the traditional centralized grid system. Consequently, the smart grid is undergoing a transformation to the decentralized topology from its centralized form. On the other hand, blockchain has some excellent features which make it a promising application for smart grid paradigm. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive survey on application of blockchain in smart grid. As such, we identify the significant security challenges of smart grid scenarios that can be addressed by blockchain. Then, we present a number of blockchain-based recent research works presented in different literatures addressing security issues in the area of smart grid. We also summarize several related practical projects, trials, and products that have been emerged recently. Finally, we discuss essential research challenges and future directions of applying blockchain to smart grid security issues.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figures, 5 table

A Reference Architecture for Blockchain-based Peer-to-Peer IoT Applications

The advent of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies enable IoT and smart city application developers to conceive new types of applications and solutions for identity management, trust, and data monetization. However, architecting blockchain-based IoT applications remain challenging due to the heterogeneous nature of blockchain platforms and lack of guidelines on how to interface existing components in the IoT ecosystem with the emerging Blockchain technology. This article explains the characteristics of blockchain and IoT technologies and presents a general reference architecture that can be used to develop many blockchain-based peer-to-peer IoT applications

When Energy Trading meets Blockchain in Electrical Power System: The State of the Art

With the rapid growth of renewable energy resources, the energy trading began to shift from centralized to distributed manner. Blockchain, as a distributed public ledger technology, has been widely adopted to design new energy trading schemes. However, there are many challenging issues for blockchain-based energy trading, i.e., low efficiency, high transaction cost, security & privacy issues. To tackle with the above challenges, many solutions have been proposed. In this survey, the blockchain-based energy trading in electrical power system is thoroughly investigated. Firstly, the challenges in blockchain-based energy trading are identified. Then, the existing energy trading schemes are studied and classified into three categories based on their main focus: energy transaction, consensus mechanism, and system optimization. And each category is presented in detail. Although existing schemes can meet the specific energy trading requirements, there are still many unsolved problems. Finally, the discussion and future directions are given

Blockchain And The Future of the Internet: A Comprehensive Review

Blockchain is challenging the status quo of the central trust infrastructure currently prevalent in the Internet towards a design principle that is underscored by decentralization, transparency, and trusted auditability. In ideal terms, blockchain advocates a decentralized, transparent, and more democratic version of the Internet. Essentially being a trusted and decentralized database, blockchain finds its applications in fields as varied as the energy sector, forestry, fisheries, mining, material recycling, air pollution monitoring, supply chain management, and their associated operations. In this paper, we present a survey of blockchain-based network applications. Our goal is to cover the evolution of blockchain-based systems that are trying to bring in a renaissance in the existing, mostly centralized, space of network applications. While re-imagining the space with blockchain, we highlight various common challenges, pitfalls, and shortcomings that can occur. Our aim is to make this work as a guiding reference manual for someone interested in shifting towards a blockchain-based solution for one's existing use case or automating one from the ground up.Comment: Under Review in IEEE COMS

Towards Distributed Clouds

This review focuses on the evolution of cloud computing and distributed ledger technologies (blockchains) over the last decade. Cloud computing relies mainly on a conceptually centralized service provisioning model, while blockchain technologies originate from a peer-to-peer and a completely distributed approach. Still, noteworthy commonalities between both approaches are often overlooked by researchers. Therefore, to the best of the authors knowledge, this paper reviews both domains in parallel for the first time. We conclude that both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of centralized service provisioning approaches are often the disadvantages of distributed ledger approaches and vice versa. It is obviously an interesting question whether both approaches could be combined in a way that the advantages can be added while the disadvantages could be avoided. We derive a software stack that could build the foundation unifying the best of these two worlds and that would avoid existing shortcomings like vendor lock-in, some security problems, and inherent platform dependencies

An Exploration of Blockchain Enabled Decentralized Capability based Access Control Strategy for Space Situation Awareness

Space situation awareness (SSA) includes tracking of active and inactive resident space objects (RSOs) and assessing the space environment through sensor data collection and processing. To enhance SSA, the dynamic data-driven applications systems (DDDAS) framework couples on-line data with off-line models to enhance system performance. Using feedback control, sensor management, and communications reliability. For information management, there is a need for identity authentication and access control to ensure the integrity of exchanged data as well as to grant authorized entities access right to data and services. Due to decentralization and heterogeneity of SSA systems, it is challenging to build an efficient centralized access control system, which could either be a performance bottleneck or the single point of failure. Inspired by the blockchain and smart contract technology, this paper introduces BlendCAC, a decentralized authentication and capability-based access control mechanism to enable effective protection for devices, services and information in SSA networks. To achieve secure identity authentication, the BlendCAC leverages the blockchain to create virtual trust zones and a robust identity-based capability token management strategy is proposed. A proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented on both resources-constrained devices and more powerful computing devices, and is tested on a private Ethereum blockchain network. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the BlendCAC scheme to offer a decentralized, scalable, lightweight and fine-grained access control solution for space system towards SSA.Comment: Submitted to SPIE Optical Engineering, Special Section on Sensors and Systems for Space Applications. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1804.0926

On the Convergence of Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) Technologies

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology will soon become an integral part of our daily lives to facilitate the control and monitoring of processes and objects and revolutionize the ways that human interacts with the physical world. For all features of IoT to become fully functional in practice, there are several obstacles on the way to be surmounted and critical challenges to be addressed. These include, but are not limited to cybersecurity, data privacy, energy consumption, and scalability. The Blockchain decentralized nature and its multi-faceted procedures offer a useful mechanism to tackle several of these IoT challenges. However, applying the Blockchain protocols to IoT without considering their tremendous computational loads, delays, and bandwidth overhead can let to a new set of problems. This review evaluates some of the main challenges we face in the integration of Blockchain and IoT technologies and provides insights and high-level solutions that can potentially handle the shortcomings and constraints of both IoT and Blockchain technologies.Comment: Includes 11 Pages, 3 Figures, To publish in Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability for issue JSIS 14(1

A Taxonomy for Understanding the Security Technical Debts in Blockchain Based Systems

Blockchain is a disruptive technology intended at implementing secure decentralized distributed systems, in which transactional data can be shared, stored and verified by participants of a system using cryptographic and consensus mechanisms, elevating the need for a central authentication/verification authority. Contrary to the belief, blockchain-based systems are not inherently secure by design; it is crucial for security software engineers to be aware of the various blockchain specific architectural design decisions and choices and their consequences on the dependability of the software system. We argue that sub-optimal and ill-informed design decisions and choices of blockchain components and their configurations including smart contracts, key management, cryptographic and consensus mechanisms, on-chain vs. off chain storage choices can introduce security technical debt into the system. The technical debt metaphor can serve as a powerful tool for early, preventive and transparent evaluation of the security design of blockchain-based systems by making the potential security technical debt visible to security software engineers. We review the core architectural components of blockchain-based systems and we show how the ill-choice or sub-optimal design decisions and configuration of these components can manifest into security technical debt. We contribute to a taxonomy that classifies the blockchain specific design decisions and choices and we describe their connection to potential debts. The taxonomy can help architects of this category of systems avoid potential security risks by visualising the security technical debts and raising its visibility. We use examples from two case studies to discuss the taxonomy and its application

A Survey on Blockchain Interoperability: Past, Present, and Future Trends

Blockchain interoperability is emerging as one of the crucial features of blockchain technology, but the knowledge necessary for achieving it is fragmented. This fact makes it challenging for academics and the industry to seamlessly achieve interoperability among blockchains. Given the novelty and potential of this new domain, we conduct a literature review on blockchain interoperability, by collecting 262 papers, and 70 grey literature documents, constituting a corpus of 332 documents. From those 332 documents, we systematically analyzed and discussed 80 documents, including both peer-reviewed papers and grey literature. Our review classifies studies in three categories: Cryptocurrency-directed interoperability approaches, Blockchain Engines, and Blockchain Connectors. Each category is further divided into sub-categories based on defined criteria. We discuss not only studies within each category and subcategory but also across categories, providing a holistic overview of blockchain interoperability, paving the way for systematic research in this domain. Our findings show that blockchain interoperability has a much broader spectrum than cryptocurrencies. The present survey leverages an interesting approach: we systematically contacted the authors of grey literature papers and industry solutions to obtain an updated view of their work. Finally, this paper discusses supporting technologies, standards, use cases, open challenges, and provides several future research directions.Comment: For any comments or suggestions, contact rafael.belchior AT t\'ecnico.ulisboa.p

Designing a blockchain-based IoT infrastructure with Ethereum, Swarm and LoRa

Today, the number of IoT devices in all aspects of life is exponentially increasing. The cities we are living in are getting smarter and informing us about our surroundings in a contextual manner. However, there lay significant challenges of deploying, managing and collecting data from these devices, in addition to the problem of storing and mining that data for higher-quality IoT services. Blockchain technology, even in today's nascent form, contains the pillars to create a common, distributed, trustless and autonomous infrastructure system. This paper describes a standardized IoT infrastructure; where data is stored on a DDOS-resistant, fault-tolerant, distributed storage service and data access is managed by a decentralized, trustless blockchain. The illustrated system used LoRa as the emerging network technology, Swarm as the distributed data storage and Ethereum as the blockchain platform. Such a data backend will ensure high availability with minimal security risks while replacing traditional backend systems with a single "smart contract".Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine on 22.04.2018 - published version may diffe