Blockchain Technology and Reputation System for Smart Grids to Address Cyber-Attacks

Abstract

The smart grid model has made a big technological leap over the traditional electrical grid. This model contributes to protecting the physical environment as it provides many benefits such as improved quality of services, efficient use of the traditional electrical grid, and renewable power resources that depend on many resources such as the sun and wind energy. However, smart grids suffer from some security problems such as the communication protocols. These protocols do not include proper authentication and access control mechanisms. The consequences of security breaches in smart grids are devastating because this could lead to the complete layoff of the power grid and cause economic effects on the power systems. To address the security issues (unsafe communication protocols - internal attackers) in smart grids, we propose in this research a new distributed framework to address internal attackers to protect smart grids against False Data Injection (FDI) attack based on Blockchain Technology and a reputation score system to enhance self-defense capability. Blockchain is a distributed data architecture in which all data elements are permanently registered after validation by most nodes in a P2P (Peer-to-Peer) network. We define reputation as the user's reliability, and more precisely and clearly, reputation is the opinion of a machine or user about devices and other users. This thesis presents actual results as a conceptual reference to assist smart grid developers and researchers in proposing a secure architecture for smart grids and to provide a performance analysis of this approach based on implementing Blockchain technology and reputation score system in the smart grid domains and sub-domains.