Cloud-Assisted Privacy Protection Energy Trading Based on IBS and Homomorphic Encryption in IIoT

Abstract

The decentralized and tamper-proof features of blockchain technology can solve the problems of low compatibility, poor flexibility, and single point of failure in the traditional Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, the transparency of the blockchain ledger makes the privacy disclosure of users a huge security risk. Given the privacy leakage problem exposed in the existing energy trading scheme based on the blockchain, this paper creatively proposes a privacy protection scheme for IIoT energy trading based on an identity-based signature (IBS) and homomorphic encryption. On the premise of satisfying the transaction traceability and verifiability, this scheme uses IBS technology to provide an anonymous mechanism for energy trading nodes and utilizes Paillier homomorphic encryption to prevent the disclosure of transaction amounts. To meet the high-concurrency and high-throughput energy trading requirements in IIoT, moreover, the proposed scheme combines the off-chain storage with cloud assistance and the off-chain transaction based on PCN to reduce redundant data written into the blockchain and to improve the concurrent trading efficiency, respectively. The security analysis and performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme can realize the dual privacy protection of identities and transaction amounts in the trading process at the cost of reasonable calculation.

Keywords

• cloud computing
• blockchain
• Industrial Internet of things
• payment channel network
• identity-based cryptography
• homomorphic encryption