An Efficient Decentralized Secure Energy Management Framework for Smart Grid System

Abstract

Over the last few decades, emerging technologies (such as Big Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, Software Defined Networks, etc.) necessitated a paradigm shift from a traditional centralized communication infrastructure to decentralized one. In such a setup, billions of Internetenabled devices are interconnected in an environment popularly known as Internet-of-Things (IoT). the number of such interconnections reduces the computational overhead and complexity by distributing the workload among geo-located nodes. However, it may generate various types of security threats and challenges due to the usage of an open channel i.e., the Internet. The security threats such as denial-of-service, eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle, etc. are dependent on authorization, authentication, and accountability (AAA) methods used in the IoT environment. Extensible authentication protocol (EAP) is one of the popular authentication protocols used to mitigate these attacks in an IoT environment. Also, the transport layer security (TLS) and secure socket layer (SSL) are necessary protocols used along EAP for establishing a secure communication channel between various smart devices in this environment. However, the aforementioned schemes are built using a centralized architecture or heavily rely on central decision-making authority, raising issues of a single point of failure and long delay. From the above discussion, it is clear that security and privacy are the major concerns for the successful implementation of any solution in such an environment. Moreover, the evolution of technologies as mentioned above make it difficult to capitalize the existing centralized security mechanism to handle the diverse requirements of geo-dispersed ecosystems (edge computing, smart grid, intelligent transportation systems, etc.) To overcome these issues, blockchain technology is being used that provides identity privacy and transaction security using a decentralized and dependable architecture. It is a peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to provide security and