A Blockchain-based Energy Trading Scheme for Electric Vehicles

An energy-trading system is essential for the successful integration of Electric vehicles (EVs) into the smart grid. Existing systems merely focus on making optimal decisions while others depend on anonymization to achieve EVs drivers' privacy which is not enough because they can be identified from visited locations. In this paper, leveraging blockchain technology, we propose a privacy-preserving charging-station-to-vehicle (CS2V) energy trading scheme. To preserve privacy, EVs are anonymous, however, a malicious EV may abuse the anonymity to launch Sybil attacks by pretending as multiple non-exiting EVs to launch powerful attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS) by submitting multiple reservations/offers without committing to them, to prevent other EVs from charging and make the trading system unreliable. To thwart the Sybil attacks, we use a common prefix linkable anonymous authentication scheme, so that if an EV submits multiple reservations/offers at the same timeslot, the blockchain can identify such submissions. To further protect the privacy of EV drivers, we introduce an anonymous and efficient blockchain-based payment system that cannot link individual drivers to specific charging locations. Our experimental results indicate that our schemes are secure and privacy-preserving with low communication and computation overheads.

Automated summary

An energy trading system is essential for successfully integrating Electric vehicles (EVs) into the smart grid. This paper proposes a privacy-preserving charging-station-to-vehicle (CS2V) energy trading scheme using blockchain technology to prevent malicious EVs from abusing anonymity to launch Sybil attacks. Experimental results show that the scheme is secure, privacy-preserving, and has low communication and computation overheads.