BBNP: A Blockchain-Based Novel Paradigm for Fair and Secure Smart Grid Communications

As the future energy infrastructure, smart grid aims to overcome the disadvantages of traditional power grid, e.g., low efficiency and unstable service. However, the frequent collection and analysis of the user’s electricity data may bring various security and privacy threats. Besides, the traditional centralized data storage model in the smart grid is prone to the single point of failure. To address these challenges, in this article, for fair and secure smart grid communication, a blockchain-based novel paradigm, named BBNP, is proposed. Specifically, based on the pseudorandom function and auxiliary information generation and sharing technology, a lightweight data aggregation protocol is designed first to protect the user’s data privacy and ensure communication confidentiality. Then, a novel efficient authentication mechanism is proposed to generate and share session keys in a noninteractive way, which is leveraged for MAC authentication to achieve data integrity of the transmitted data. After that, based on the subjective logic reputation model, a blockchain node consensus mechanism is studied to efficiently store smart grid big data and effectively solve the single point failure problem. By constructing the long-term reputation model for consensus nodes (CNs) and integrating batch verification technology, the problems of CN fair selection and scalability of large-scale nodes are solved simultaneously. Finally, the performance evaluation indicates that BBNP outperforms the state-of-the-art similar schemes in computing complexity, communication cost, system availability, and fairness of block generation.