Blockchain Enables Your Bill Safer

As one of the most frequently used Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, energy smart meter has been widely adopted to facilitate the measures of residential energy use. Residents pay for the bills from energy suppliers according to their monthly/seasonal usage. Practically, there is a demand from residents/governments to check whether the bills are in line with their real consumptions. However, it is challenging to realize this demand due to two critical problems. The first problem refers to the nonrepudiated privacy issue caused by access to residents' energy consumption history (e.g., data integrity may be questioned, and residents' daily timetables may be exposed). The second problem comes from the efficiency requirement for bulk auditing requests on residents' bills and consumptions, usually risen by governments. So far, we have not found any solutions that can be directly used in this case. In this article, we propose using homomorphic encryption cooperated with the blockchain technique to leverage the data auditing and privacy-preserving requirements. We also employe a certificateless signature to resolve the efficiency bottleneck in batch auditing. This framework, called pAuditChain, not only accepts personal requests from residents for consumption checking but also handles bulk auditing requests issued by governments. To validate the correctness of the framework functions, we carried out a series of theoretical analysis, especially on the privacy preserving and auditing processes. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed framework is among the first solutions to improve the security and privacy of bills without losing the auditing function. Our approach concerns with IoT smart meters in energy supply industries and could be further extended to other forms of IoT devices with the bill demands.

Automated summary

In this article, a framework called pAuditChain is proposed to address the data auditing and privacy protection issues of smart meter bills using homomorphic encryption and blockchain technology. The framework not only accommodates individual consumption checking requests but also handles bulk auditing requests from governments. The proposed solution improves the security and privacy of bills without compromising the auditing function.