Energy storage units (ESUs) including EVs and home batteries enable several attractive features of the modern smart grids such as effective demand response and reduced electric bills. However, uncoordinated charging of ESUs stresses the power system. In this paper, we propose privacy-preserving and collusion-resistant charging coordination centralized and decentralized schemes for the smart grid. The centralized scheme is used in case of robust communication infrastructure that connects the ESUs to the utility, while the decentralized scheme is useful in case of infrastructure not available or costly. In the centralized scheme, each energy storage unit should acquire anonymous tokens from a charging controller (CC) to send multiple charging requests to the CC via the aggregator. CC can use the charging requests to enough data to run the charging coordination scheme, but it cannot link the data to particular ESUs or reveal any private information. Our centralized scheme uses a modified knapsack problem formulation technique to maximize the amount of power delivered to the ESUs before the charging requests expire without exceeding the available maximum charging capacity. In the decentralized scheme, several ESUs run the scheme in a distributed way with no need to aggregator or CC. One ESU is selected as a head node that should decrypt the ciphertext of the aggregated messages of the ESUs' messages and broadcast it to the community while not revealing the ESUs' individual charging demands. Then, ESUs can coordinate charging requests based on the aggregated charging demand while not exceeding the maximum charging capacity. Extensive experiments and simulations are conducted to demonstrate that our schemes are efficient and secure against various attacks, and can preserve ESU owner's privacy.
@cite_38 , a decentralized charging coordination has been proposed based on the blockchain to enable a transparent, reliable charging coordination among ESUs. However, while blockchain can reduce the reliance on intermediaries @cite_9 , the scheme can not be used where there is no reliable communication like developing countries.
@cite_38 @cite_9
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Energy storage units (ESUs) enable several attractive features of modern smart grids such as enhanced grid resilience, effective demand response, and reduced bills. However, uncoordinated charging of ESUs stresses the power system and can lead to a blackout. On the other hand, existing charging coordination mechanisms suffer from several limitations. First, the need for a central charging coordinator (CC) presents a single point of failure that jeopardizes the effectiveness of the charging coordination. Second, a transparent charging coordination mechanism does not exist where users are not aware whether the CC is honest or not in coordination charging requests among them in a fair way. Third, existing mechanisms overlook the privacy concerns of the involved customers. To address these limitations, in this paper, we leverage the blockchain and smart contracts to build a decentralized charging coordination mechanism without the need for a centralized charging coordinator. First ESUs should use tokens for anonymously authenticate themselves to the blockchain. Then each ESU sends a charging request that contains its State-of-Charge (SoC), Time-to-complete-charge (TCC) and amount of required charging to the smart contract address on the blockchain. The smart contract will then run the charging coordination mechanism in a self-executed manner such that ESUs with the highest priorities are charged in the present time slot while charging requests of lower priority ESUs are deferred to future time slots. In this way, each ESU can make sure that charging schedules are computed correctly. Finally, we have implemented the proposed mechanism on the Ethereum test-bed blockchain, and our analysis shows that execution cost can be acceptable in terms of gas consumption while enabling decentralized charging coordination with increased transparency, reliability, and privacy preserving. Recently, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have gained extensive attention from both academia and industry. AVs are a complex system composed of many subsystems, making them a typical target for attackers. Therefore, the firmware of the different subsystems needs to be updated to the latest version by the manufacturer to fix bugs and introduce new features, e.g., using security patches. In this paper, we propose a distributed firmware update scheme for the AVs' subsystems, leveraging blockchain and smart contract technology. A consortium blockchain made of different AVs manufacturers is used to ensure the authenticity and integrity of firmware updates. Instead of depending on centralized third parties to distribute the new updates, we enable AVs, namely distributors, to participate in the distribution process and we take advantage of their mobility to guarantee high availability and fast delivery of the updates. To incentivize AVs to distribute the updates, a reward system is established that maintains a credit reputation for each distributor account in the blockchain. A zero-knowledge proof protocol is used to exchange the update in return for a proof of distribution in a trust-less environment. Moreover, we use attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme to ensure that only authorized AVs will be able to download and use a new update. Our analysis indicates that the additional cryptography primitives and exchanged transactions do not affect the operation of the AVs network. Also, our security analysis demonstrates that our scheme is efficient and secure against different attacks.