Performance Evaluation of Cryptographic Schemes for Blockchain Security of Smart Grids

Blockchain technology can be applied to smart grids to support business and management operations, and its distributed nature is advantageous when considering user-managed renewable systems. However, these new fully distributed systems raise a number of security and privacy issues. For this reason, numerous solutions integrating blockchain with privacy and security enhancing technologies, such as homomorphic encryption, secret sharing and zero-knowledge proof, have been proposed in the literature. The complexity of such systems from an algorithmic and protocol point of view is obvious, while the computational cost is less obvious and often overlooked by the authors. In this paper, we want to experimentally evaluate the computational weight of cryptographic techniques proposed to guarantee security and privacy on blockchains. We will take as reference commercial devices with computational capabilities similar to those we expect to find in smart grid devices. The results show that some techniques are not suitable for these scenarios and that architectural solutions must therefore be carefully designed.