S-BAN: Secure Blockchain-Based Anonymous Networking Strategy for Privacy-Preserving DSM

Demand-side management (DSM) is an essential tool in smart power grids to enable efficient energy utilization. In DSM, customers send their fine-grained energy consumption data to the utility company (UC). This fine-grained data can reveal private information about the customers. Hence, many privacy-preserving proposals are made to overcome such a threat. However, existing mechanisms do not satisfy both customer anonymity and data unlinkability. To address this limitation, we propose a blockchain-based anonymous networking strategy called (BAN) that uses group signatures and unique random identifiers on top of a blockchain network to provide the desirable features. However, our security analysis reveals that adopting anonymous signatures on top of blockchains opens the door to other forms of cyber-attacks, such as denial-of-service (DoS), man-in-the-middle (MitM), and traffic analysis attacks. Hence, we propose a secure BAN (S-BAN) network that upgrades the BAN to enable secure and privacy-preserving DSM. The S-BAN is based on a novel onion routing with blockchain interconnected servers strategy (ORBITS). Our implementation of the proposed strategy demonstrates low computation and communication overheads. The S-BAN can handle messages from up to 12,000 customers in a DSM period of 15 minutes.