Abstract

Virtual Power Plant (VPP) has emerged as a prominent smart grid technology aggregating distributed energy resources and driving the energy transition. However, the increasing number of user-side devices make it more feasible to compromise the access security in VPP. Existing schemes for enhancing access security in VPP are not universally suitable for handling massive, heterogeneous, and resource-constrained devices with diverse communication protocols. In this paper, we propose an attribute-based fingerprinting scheme, that is lightweight, transparent, and does not require any security capabilities on user-side devices. Specifically, an attribute tree is established based on Merkle hash tree to aggregate the unique and common attributes of user-side devices, generating a fingerprint to indicate device attribute integrity. The hierarchical directory is maintained to aggregate the devices to obtain hierarchical fingerprints and access states. The proposed scheme facilitates passive identity authentication, abnormal detection, and hierarchical verification, thereby enhancing access security in VPP. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is lightweight and efficient in large-scale VPP applications.