Blockchain-Based Decentralized Lightweight Control Access Scheme for Smart Grids

The integration of wireless networks and Internet of things (IoT)-enabled communication between smart grid entities to address the challenges in supply chain including mutual authentication and privacy persistence, and control access scheme is critical in smart grids. In the last decade, numerous control access schemes have been presented. However, existing schemes are not reliable in terms of security and privacy and they involve third parties and central management system that leads the smart grid toward untrustworthiness and single-point failure. In addition, smart meters are managed through a central entity called service provider, and due to centralization, it involves single-point failure. Moreover, IoT-based smart meters are vulnerable due to untrusted environment; thus, it requires to establish trusted control access between entities of network to exchange messages. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a decentralized trusted control access scheme by leveraging blockchain technology to ensure trusted communication between entities of smart grid by protecting data transmission requests which are sent/received by smart meter to network. In conclusion, an analysis in the context of security and performance is presented. The analysis depicts that the proposed scheme is effective in terms of computational and storage cost.