GarliChain: A privacy preserving system for smart grid consumers using blockchain

This paper proposes a blockchain system, known as GarliChain, to solve the problems of anonymity and privacy of consumers during energy trading in the smart grids. It is inspired by both garlic routing and consortium blockchain. In the GarliChain, identity-based encryption is used to encrypt the messages of consumers twice before transmitting them to other nodes. A stochastic path selection model is presented in this work to route messages from the source node to the destination node. Furthermore, a trust method is proposed to enhance the credibility of nodes in the network. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed system. From the results, the proposed system remains stable as the number of path requests increases. Also, the proposed trust method is 50.56% efficient in detecting dishonest behavior of nodes in the network as compared to 49.20% of an existing fuzzy trust model. Under different sizes of the blocks, the computational cost of the forwarding nodes is minimum. The security analysis shows that the system is safe from both passive and active attacks. Malicious nodes are detected using the path selection model. Moreover, a comparative study of the proposed system with existing systems in the literature is provided.