Front-running attacks in a blockchain-based trading system for electricity in prosumers communities.

Nowadays the continuous increase in the world energy consumption is bringing to the attention of everyone the problem of sustainability, since this demand still relies mainly on non-renewable energy sources. In this context, smart energy grids are emerging, as they allow to better exploit the distributed energy resources (DER), which are based instead on a renewable and thus more sustainable energy production. The thesis points out the front-running vulnerabilities and proposes prevention strategies to mitigate possible attacks in a blockchain-based trading system for electricity in prosumer communities. An investigation of the blockchain front-running literature is presented in order to define the problem in the analysed project. A complete redesign of the smart contract is performed to implement front-running prevention strategies and to improve the performance in term of computational complexity. In addition, a new auction management approach to include electricity storage capabilities together with selling strategies is introduced to achieve a complete decentralised auction system and better exploit blockchain properties. The thesis demonstrates that the front-running problem has to be evaluated on a case by case basis to propose custom solutions. In particular, the results prove that tailored front-running prevention strategies do not affect the functioning and the performance of the system.