Secure and Privacy-Preserving Energy Trading With Demand Response Assistance Based on Blockchain

The large-scale integration of decentralized energy resources has resulted in surgical changes in energy trading systems. Traditional centralized trading systems suffer from high management costs and low efficiency. The recent advance in blockchain technology has enabled the invention of decentralized energy trading systems, which can overcome the limitations of centralized trading systems. However, security and privacy concerns have become obstacles when widely marketing and implementing decentralized energy trading systems. For example, the on-chain transactions are publicly visible, leading to the risk of trading information leakages. Moreover, in the demand response (DR) assistance process, the aggregated report of energy trading results may contain detailed trading information which results in user privacy leakage. To address those problems, this article proposes a blockchain-based privacy-aware energy trading mechanism. We design a stealthy on-chain transmission method to protect user privacy without revealing the consumer-supplier trading relationship and the exact trading data. Furthermore, we employ non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proof to aggregate reports in a reliable and privacy-preserving manner. Security analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can achieve security goals with affordable cost for decentralized energy trading systems.