A Distributed Security SDN Cluster Architecture for Smart Grid Based on Blockchain Technology

This paper proposes a smart grid distributed security architecture based on blockchain technology and SDN cluster structure, referred to as ClusterBlock model, which combines the advantages of two emerging technologies, blockchain and SDN. The blockchain technology allows for distributed peer-to-peer networks, where the network can ensure the trusted interaction of untrusted nodes in the network. At the same time, this article adopts the design of an SDN controller distributed cluster to avoid single point of failure and balance the load between equipment and the controller. A cluster head was selected in each SDN cluster, and it was used as a blockchain node to construct an SDN cluster head blockchain. By combining blockchain technology, the security and privacy of the SDN communication network can be enhanced. At the same time, this paper designs a distributed control strategy and network attack detection algorithm based on blockchain consensus and introduces the Jaccard similarity coefficient to detect the network attacks. Finally, this paper evaluates the ClusterBlock model and the existing model based on the OpenFlow protocol through simulation experiments and compares the security performance. The evaluation results show that the ClusterBlock model has more stable bandwidth and stronger security performance in the face of DDoS attacks of the same scale.

AntibIoTic: The Fog-enhanced distributed security system to protect the (legacy) Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving our society; however, the growing adoption of IoT devices in many scenarios brings security and privacy implications. Current security solutions are either unsuitable for every IoT scenario or provide only partial security. This paper presents AntibIoTic 2.0, a distributed security system that relies on Fog computing to secure IoT devices, including legacy ones. The system is composed of a backbone, made of core Fog nodes and Cloud server, a Fog node acting at the edge as the gateway of the IoT network, and a lightweight agent running on each IoT device. The proposed system offers fine-grained, host-level security coupled with network-level protection, while its distributed nature makes it scalable, versatile, lightweight, and easy to deploy, also for legacy IoT deployments. AntibIoTic 2.0 can also publish anonymized and aggregated data and statistics on the deployments it secures, to increase awareness and push cooperations in the area of IoT security. This manuscript recaps and largely expands previous works on AntibIoTic, providing an enhanced design of the system, an extended proof-of-concept that proves its feasibility and shows its operation, and an experimental evaluation that reports the low computational overhead it causes.

Secure biometric authentication with de-duplication on distributed cloud storage

Cloud computing is one of the evolving fields of technology, which allows storage, access of data, programs, and their execution over the internet with offering a variety of information related services. With cloud information services, it is essential for information to be saved securely and to be distributed safely across numerous users. Cloud information storage has suffered from issues related to information integrity, data security, and information access by unauthenticated users. The distribution and storage of data among several users are highly scalable and cost-efficient but results in data redundancy and security issues. In this article, a biometric authentication scheme is proposed for the requested users to give access permission in a cloud-distributed environment and, at the same time, alleviate data redundancy. To achieve this, a cryptographic technique is used by service providers to generate the bio-key for authentication, which will be accessible only to authenticated users. A Gabor filter with distributed security and encryption using XOR operations is used to generate the proposed bio-key (biometric generated key) and avoid data deduplication in the cloud, ensuring avoidance of data redundancy and security. The proposed method is compared with existing algorithms, such as convergent encryption (CE), leakage resilient (LR), randomized convergent encryption (RCE), secure de-duplication scheme (SDS), to evaluate the de-duplication performance. Our comparative analysis shows that our proposed scheme results in smaller computation and communication costs than existing schemes.

A power trading mode based on blockchain for prosumers

With the increase of the penetration rate of distributed generation on the distribution network side, the access of a large number of prosumers makes the trading information massive, and the demand of prosumers for more flexible power trading mechanism is also strengthened. Therefore, a weak-centralized power trading mode based on blockchain is proposed in this paper. Trading information is automatically stored in the blockchain in the form of smart contracts. The centralized organization only manages congestion and does not participate in the process of trading matching and settlement. In the distributed security verification, the successive over relaxation (SOR) iterative method is improved in this paper, which improves the iterative efficiency and convergence stability of the distributed algorithm. Finally, a case consisting of six nodes is presented to verify the feasibility of the method.