An Efficient Blockchain-Based Authentication Scheme for Energy-Trading in V2G Networks

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) networks have been emerged as a new technology in the smart grid (SG). These networks allow a two-way flow of energy-trading between electric vehicles (EVs) and charging stations (CSs) in the SG. EVs are regarded as one of the most effective tools to reduce energy demands. It will bring a great impact on our society and human life. Thus, during energy trading between EVs and CSs, various security, and privacy challenges occur in V2G networks. Although several proposals have been proposed, still there are many issues like lack of integrity, mutual authentication, and identity privacy-preservation make the system more vulnerable. Researchers have used the centralized system in V2G networks which may act as a single point of failure. So, for deploying secure V2G networks in the SG, we propose an energy-trading scheme having blockchain between three communicating parties, i.e., EVs, CSs, utility center. The proposed system is divided into three phases, first, the registration process provides identity privacy-preservation to the EVs and CSs, second, the searching process makes the registration and key-generation steps faster, and third, the authentication process provides mutual authentication between them and a blockchain network is used to execute transactions using Merkle Root Hash. The security analysis result shows that the proposed scheme is secure for energy-trading in V2G networks. The performance evaluation results illustrate that our scheme has less communication cost and computation time as compared to the existing proposals.