Secure and Privacy-preserving Energy Trading Scheme based on Blockchain

The large-scale integration of distributed energy resources has resulted in surgical changes in energy trading systems. Traditional centralized trading systems suffer from high management cost and low efficiency. The recent advance of blockchain technology has enabled the invention of distributed energy trading systems, which can overcome the limitations of centralized trading systems. However, the distributed energy trading systems also bring new security and privacy challenges. For instance, transactions on blockchain are publicly visible which can lead to privacy leakage of trading information. Moreover, user privacy can also be leaked during verification of the aggregated energy trading result. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving energy trading scheme based on blockchain to meet the security requirements for distributed energy trading. We adopt a stealth transmission approach based on blockchain to ensure data privacy and break the linkage between consumers and providers in the energy trading process. We also use the non-interactive zero-knowledge proof technology to achieve privacy-preserving and trustworthy trading result verification. Security analysis and evaluation results have demonstrated that the proposed scheme can effectively protect the data privacy for distributed energy trading systems.