SNIPPET school on secure P2P energy trading: From theory to practice

Secure P2P energy trading: From theory to practice, 16 October – 21 October 2022, Minoa Palace Resort, Crete

A peer-to-peer electricity market allows users to trade electricity among themselves and increases their financial well-being. In addition, electricity exchange between nearby users can significantly reduce the electricity loss during transmission over the distribution lines. Bids and offers in such a market can be created from a heterogeneous set of generation devices, such as PV, storage devices, such as batteries, and flexible loads, such as electric boilers. However, such markets may also create an opportunity for malicious entities to misbehave in order to reduce costs or maximise profits. Potential threats are impersonation, data manipulation, eavesdropping, disputes, and privacy breaches. Moreover, the shifting responsibilities brought about by local trading necessitate fundamental research into the application of centralised regulatory regimes such as European data protection law and network and information security (NIS) law. Both legal regimes have undergone notable reforms, with the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the NIS Directive, which will be transposed into Member State law as of 2018. As an example of a privacy breach, consider entities which have access to users’ offers and bids. They may use this data to infer who is selling or buying how much electricity and when. Such data is closely correlated to users’ consumption patterns, which potentially reveal sensitive information; and which may facilitate consumer profiling by fingerprinting and tracking the use of specific electronic appliances.