Privacy-Preserving and Efficient Aggregation Based on Blockchain for Power Grid Communications in Smart Communities

Intelligence is one of the most important aspects in the development of our future communities. Ranging from smart home to smart building to smart city, all these smart infrastructures must be supported by intelligent power supply. Smart grid is proposed to solve all challenges of future electricity supply. In smart grid, in order to realize optimal scheduling, an SM is installed at each home to collect the near-real-time electricity consumption data, which can be used by the utilities to offer better smart home services. However, the near-real-time data may disclose a user's private information. An adversary may track the application usage patterns by analyzing the user's electricity consumption profile. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving and efficient data aggregation scheme. We divide users into different groups, and each group has a private blockchain to record its members' data. To preserve the inner privacy within a group, we use pseudonyms to hide users' identities, and each user may create multiple pseudonyms and associate his/ her data with different pseudonyms. In addition, the bloom filter is adopted for fast authentication. The analysis shows that the proposed scheme can meet the security requirements and achieve better performance than other popular methods.