Abstract
Currently, there has been a paradigm shifted in the storing of electronic payment records (EPRs) on mobile distributed systems, wherein mobile devices are coupled with cloud computing to ease financial data transfers between consumers and stakeholders. This enhanced architecture allows low-cost online payment services with high versatility and EPR accessibility. Nevertheless, for e-payment platforms, such a new paradigm poses worries about data privacy and network security. A difficult challenge is how to reliably disseminate EPRs across mobile users while maintaining high-security security standards in the mobile cloud. This paper investigates and demonstrates the electronic payment approach of urban mobile pass cards’ dependability and excellence. Furthermore, on a mobile cloud platform, our technology integrates blockchain with the decentralized interplanetary file system (IPFS). We specifically create a reliable access control method on smart contracts to ensure secure EPR sharing across various clients and stakeholders. Our empirical results indicate that our concept provides a viable solution for data transfers on mobile clouds while protecting critical payment information from potential attacks. When compared to previous data sharing models, the system evaluation and security analysis show performance gains in lightweight access control architecture, minimal network latency with excellent security and data confidentiality levels.
1. Introduction
With the rapid popularity of mobile communication networks, mobile electronic payment has gradually become the preferred payment method for many people’s daily shopping [1]. According to data, the domestic mobile payment business exceeded 200 billion strokes in September 2020, with transaction amounts reaching 80 trillion yuan, a 24% increase over the same period in 2019, achieving industry-wide coverage in scenarios such as services, retail, transportation, medical social security, and public payment [2, 3]. In recent years, the mobile payment business in China’s financial sector has grown fast, and commercial mobile payment security concerns have increasingly developed. Multiparty maintenance, encrypted transmission, decentralization, big data, internet of things, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and other cutting-edge technologies will work together to open up a new area for mobile payment apps and rebuild credit [4, 5]. Along with the development of information technology and Internet technology, advanced technology has been introduced into the financial field. The introduction, innovation, and popularity of mobile payment have greatly promoted the emergence of new mobile e-commerce businesses. For example, the authors of [6] used blockchain for diabetes detection, Haro shared bicycle, Meituan takeaway, Bitcoin, and so on [7, 8]. These new businesses have greatly improved the people’s consumption feeling happiness index and changed the payment industry structure. The profit space and development prospect of mobile payment are great. The mobile payment market has become increasingly competitive as it has progressed from obscurity to widespread adoption. As a result, certain minor mobile payment enterprises are constantly acquired or annexed by some large mobile payment enterprises, creating an oligopoly situation in the domestic mobile payment market [9]. Not only domestic mobile payment is developing rapidly, but also mobile payment is developing well in other countries. More and more companies are beginning to research mobile payment, and a large number of companies have already started to get involved in this field [10]. The transaction value of mobile payment is growing, and the scale of mobile payment usage is also expanding. The 2012 global mobile payment transaction value was $163.1 billion, and the growth rate reached about 70%, and the growth rate of mobile payment from 2014 to 2018 reached an average growth rate of 35% [11, 12].
Due to the limitation of message propagation speed and node performance in P2P networks, a direct blockchain scaling solution will lead to a decrease in security, reliability, and decentralization of the blockchain system and therefore cannot be agreed upon by the Bitcoin community. For example, if Bitcoin wanted to achieve the same transaction throughput as VISA, it would need to expand the block size to 8 GB with no change in block out time, but few miners could afford the huge costs associated with maintaining such a blockchain, which would drastically reduce the decentralization of the Bitcoin network or even return to a centralized payment system. For this reason, historical solutions to directly expand the blockchain have failed to gain consensus in the Bitcoin community. The cryptocurrency’s low throughput problem means that a portion of the cryptocurrency’s transactions will not be credited to the chain on time, and users will need to increase the priority of transactions written to the blockchain by increasing transaction fees, which currently average over $19 for Bitcoin transactions. The low transaction throughput and high transaction fees severely limit the survival of small and high-frequency transactions on the blockchain network.
Because of the limitations with direct blockchain scaling solutions outlined above, blockchain experts have proposed off-chain alternatives. The off-chain solutions transfer the transactions on the current blockchain to off-chain processing without changing the consensus rules of the blockchain. The off-chain solutions are mainly divided into two categories: side chains and payment channel networks, which are superior to side chains in terms of transaction speed, privacy, and efficiency. A payment channel network is a peer-to-peer network formed by nodes running the payment channel node software, and the nodes are connected peer-to-peer with other nodes through the payment channel. The payment channel allows both parties to change the settlement scheme of the funds in the payment channel to achieve an off-chain transaction, and the blockchain only records the opening and closing of the channel and provides security for the off-chain transaction. This fundamentally solves the problem of low throughput and high transaction fees of blockchain and provides a good solution for the application of small transactions and high-frequency transactions on the blockchain network.
To avoid one party in the payment, the channel is offline, and the other party cannot close the payment channel to retrieve the funds; the payment channel allows participants to independently close the payment channel by announcing the latest status of the payment channel at any time. However, the blockchain cannot determine whether the submitted status is up-to-date, and a malicious payment channel participant may announce to the blockchain an out-of-date status to close the payment channel, thus gaining a share of the channel that does not belong to him. To address this issue, the closed channel transaction includes a specific dispute time feature that freezes the money of the party that declared the closed channel transaction during the dispute period. This method allows honest channel users to withdraw the frozen funds during the dispute period to recoup the possible damage caused by the fraudulent closed channel transaction and to penalize the malicious participants. Such a security mechanism requires channel participants to monitor the blockchain at least once during each dispute period; otherwise, participants may not be able to detect malicious closed channel transactions that have been submitted to the chain or may not be able to counteract malicious transactions on the chain in time.
1.1. Our Contributions
Inspired by the benefits of blockchain, we suggest a different EPRs sharing model for city mobile pass cards on a mobile cloud platform based on the blockchain approach in this study. Our suggested solution is built on a user access control architecture that manages data access from networked devices. Access control systems can effectively limit unauthorized access to EPRs assets while providing quick data retrieval for authorized organizations. To evaluate performance, we conduct several experiments. In this paper, we examine the throughput, time overhead, and reaction time of the based and suggested models. Finally, we conduct a security review to demonstrate that our architecture is far safer for electronic payment.
1.2. Rest of This Paper
The remainder of this work is arranged as follows: Section 2 is focused on mobile electronic payments. Section 3 outlines the creation and enhancement of our suggested blockchain model, Section 4 displays the experimental work and results with simulations, and Section 5 concludes the work.
2. Mobile Electronic Payments Security Problems Encountered in the Process of Mobile Payment and Advantages of Blockchain in Mobile Electronic Payment
Mobile electronic payment (also called mobile payment) refers to the use of electronic products such as cell phones by mobile clients to make electronic money payments [13]. Mobile payment is not only capable of making monetary payments but also capable of paying phone bills, gas, utilities, and other living expenses [14, 15]. It has created a new way of payment and made electronic money popular. In addition, it has certain advantages, the first of which is portability. Therefore, it uses electronic products as a medium, such as cell phones. While people enjoy the convenience of electronic products, they are also able to use them to make monetary payments, reducing the hassle of carrying cash. Besides, mobile payment is also real time, as long as the payer enters the payment password and confirms the payment. The funds will be transferred directly to the recipient’s account; there is no time limit; and the transfer can be made at any time 24 hours a day [16, 17]. Finally, the payment efficiency is high. In the process of traditional cash payment, some banknotes will be aged and broken after a long time, so it is impossible to make payment in this case. It is, therefore, necessary to make changes and bear the depreciation cost in the process of changing banknotes [18, 19]. In addition, there is even the risk of receiving counterfeit money, as some lawbreakers print counterfeit bills to make huge profits, bringing great losses to the public. Mobile payment is electronic money, which can effectively avoid these problems [20, 21].
2.1. The Current Situation of Mobile Payment Applications in China
Along with the development of information technology and Internet technology, advanced technology has been introduced into the financial field. The introduction, innovation, and popularity of mobile payment have greatly promoted the emergence of new mobile e-commerce businesses, for example, Haro shared bicycle, Meituan takeaway, Bitcoin, and so on [7, 8]. These new businesses have greatly improved the people’s consumption feeling happiness index and changed the payment industry structure. The profit space and development prospect of mobile payment are great. The mobile payment market has become increasingly competitive as it has progressed from obscurity to widespread adoption. As a result, certain minor mobile payment enterprises are constantly acquired or annexed by some large mobile payment enterprises, creating an oligopoly situation in the domestic mobile payment market [10].
According to the data released by the People’s Bank of China in 2020, more than 75% of users in China use mobile payment methods for daily shopping.
2.2. Security Problems Encountered in the Process of Mobile Payment
With the development of the 5G network, mobile terminals, and intelligent software, the mobile payment industry as a whole is booming, but the security problems of mobile payment are also emerging. For example, Samsung cell phones were banned by Bank of China, WeChat, and Alipay due to fingerprint unlocking; Tencent’s WeChat payment was malfunctioning extensively; 7-Eleven Japan suspended its YPay application, which had been online for only 2 days; and so on. Analysis of the above phenomena is mostly due to common credit card information copying, virus infection of computers and smartphones, hackers’ cracking of payment passwords, user fingerprints, voiceprints, face recognition, and other payment technologies, resulting in significant losses to users due to the use of mobile payments. According to statistics, as of December 2020, the percentage of users using face, fingerprint, and other biometric payments in China’s mobile payments exceeded 80%. Among them, the leakage of personal credit information such as face and fingerprints caused by third-party payment institutions has become a prominent issue of concern for users.
2.2.1. Technical Risks
Although mobile payment has many benefits and is convenient, there are certain risks associated with mobile payment. The development of the Internet itself has certain security risks. Network vulnerabilities, hackers, and other problems have existed since the birth of the Internet. Mobile payment mainly relies on Internet technology, so mobile payment also has corresponding technical risks. To begin with, the technological danger is mostly represented in the payment password being broken; many users’ mobile payment passwords have been taken. Because the network has no geographical boundaries, the relevant departments in the course of inquiry can seldom recover the victim’s losses after the occurrence of the party hard to forensics. Furthermore, throughout the mobile payment procedure, the wrongdoers would take the victim’s information in numerous methods to infringe on his or her property. Mobile payment primarily makes use of electronic devices, one of which is the mobile phone. Every year, there are several examples of lost and stolen cell phones. If the phone is taken, the payment information within may be stolen, and the password may be broken, posing certain concerns.
2.2.2. Control System Risks
Many mobile payments are made by third-party payment institutions linking customers, financial institutions, and retailers together, and once the internal control system of third-party payment institutions is faulty, it is easy to generate risks. The problems with the internal control of third-party payment institutions can be analyzed from two aspects: the internal control system, which includes an imperfect risk warning system that is unable to predict the occurrence of risks in advance, resulting in the inability to solve the risks in time and minimize the loss of risks. At present, the scope of third-party mobile payment is very wide, and many customers are using it, which is precisely why it is difficult to achieve comprehensiveness in the process of prevention at present. In the process of internal control for the prevention of risk, there are no corresponding emergency measures, in the face of unexpected risks that cannot be effectively resolved on time. Therefore, the existence of internal control problems can seriously affect the development of third-party payment companies.
2.2.3. Regulatory Risk
The development of mobile payment is fast, but the development of mobile payment in China is relatively late, and the relevant laws and regulations of the state in the process of supervision are not perfect. In the process of mobile payment development, the state attaches great importance to the supervision of third-party payment institutions and has introduced some corresponding laws and regulations, but the legal supervision cannot keep up with the development of institutions, and some systems still have certain problems. First of all, after the development of mobile payment, not satisfied with its income, the development of online financial management, such financial management has certain security risks. Secondly, the invisible character of mobile payment will be used by many unscrupulous elements, for example, in the gambling industry, many casinos are also using electronic payment to evade laws and regulations, and there are certain problems with the state regulation in this regard. The imperfection of the regulatory system brings potential risks to mobile payment and is also threatening the safety of users’ property at any time and affecting the development of mobile payment.
2.2.4. Irregular User Use
The risks of mobile payment do not only exist within the system but also in the users themselves. The irregularity of user operation and poor awareness of prevention can also lead to the creation of mobile payment risks. First of all, customers do not have professional knowledge, do not have a clear understanding of mobile payment, and cannot cope with risks well, such as the risk of password theft. There are also risks in the payment environment during the process of mobile payment by customers. Customers may be in markets, shopping malls, and many other places in the process of payment, and in such an environment, the password may be stolen when users make payments, leading to risks in their own mobile payments. Secondly, some users are connected to wireless networks in the process of making payments, especially wireless networks in public places, which have serious security problems, and users have not established corresponding security awareness and prevention consciousness for this. Finally, many of the major domestic mobile payment methods are currently bundled with social software, with a low degree of security prevention expertise, while customers often download some software on their cell phones, which may suffer from viruses.
2.3. Blockchain Technology
Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper on Bitcoin (BTC) in 2008 [1], announcing the birth of the blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are gaining popularity due to the blockchain’s decentralization, immutability, and transparency. As of February 2021, the number of people using cryptocurrencies has exceeded 60 million. However, with the rapid growth in the number of users and transactions, the low transaction throughput of cryptocurrencies has become an important issue that needs to be addressed. Due to the limitation of block size and block generation time, Bitcoin transaction verification speed can only reach 7 transactions/second on average, which is only about one-seventh of the existing centralized payment system VISA. Although the second-generation cryptocurrency Ether has achieved higher transaction throughput, the current average transaction speed is only 11.5 transactions/second. The above data shows that low transaction throughput is a common problem for mainstream cryptocurrencies.
Due to the limitation of message propagation speed and node performance in P2P networks, a direct blockchain scaling solution will lead to a decrease in security, reliability, and decentralization of the blockchain system and therefore cannot be agreed upon by the Bitcoin community. For example, if Bitcoin wanted to achieve the same transaction throughput as VISA, it would need to expand the block size to 8 GB with no change in block out time, but few miners could afford the huge costs associated with maintaining such a blockchain, which would drastically reduce the decentralization of the Bitcoin network or even return to a centralized payment system. For this reason, historical solutions to directly expand the blockchain have failed to gain consensus in the Bitcoin community. The cryptocurrency’s low throughput problem means that a portion of the cryptocurrency’s transactions will not be credited to the chain on time, and users will need to increase the priority of transactions written to the blockchain by increasing transaction fees, which currently average over $19 for Bitcoin transactions. The low transaction throughput and high transaction fees severely limit the survival of small and high-frequency transactions on the blockchain network.
As a result of the above-mentioned problems with direct blockchain scaling solutions, blockchain researchers have proposed off-chain solutions. The off-chain solutions transfer the transactions on the current blockchain to off-chain processing without changing the consensus rules of the blockchain. The off-chain solutions are mainly divided into two categories: side chains and payment channel networks, which are superior to side chains in terms of transaction speed, privacy, and efficiency. A payment channel network is a peer-to-peer network formed by nodes running the payment channel node software, and the nodes are connected peer-to-peer with other nodes through the payment channel. The payment channel allows both parties to change the settlement scheme of the funds in the payment channel to achieve an off-chain transaction, and the blockchain only records the opening and closing of the channel and provides security for the off-chain transaction. This fundamentally solves the problem of low throughput and high transaction fees of blockchain and provides a good solution for the application of small transactions and high-frequency transactions on the blockchain network.
To avoid the fact that one party to the payment channel is offline and the other party cannot close the payment channel for recovery of funds, the payment channel announces the latest status of the payment channel to the participants at any time. This allows the payment channel to close freely. However, the blockchain cannot determine whether the submitted status is up-to-date, and a malicious payment channel participant may announce to the blockchain an out-of-date status to close the payment channel, thus gaining a share of the channel that does not belong to him. To address this issue, the closed channel transaction includes a specific dispute time feature that freezes the money of the party that declared the closed channel transaction during the dispute period. This enables honest channel users to withdraw the frozen funds during the dispute period to recoup the possible damage caused by the fraudulent closed channel transaction and penalize the malicious players. Such a security mechanism requires channel participants to monitor the blockchain at least once during each dispute period; otherwise, participants may not be able to detect malicious closed channel transactions that have been submitted to the chain or may not be able to counteract malicious transactions on the chain in time.
3. Main Strategies Based on Blockchain Technology
With the development of blockchain national strategy, the application of blockchain technology helps improve the operational efficiency of mobile payment, greatly enhance the degree of informationization and digitization of transactions, gradually improve the credit system of mobile payment, and enhance the security of transactions. Therefore, the rapid popularity of the mobile payment market requires us to understand and analyze the security issues of mobile payment in the blockchain era, discover various security problems in the process of mobile payment, prevent them through security technology means, and better promote the safe and rapid development of mobile payment in China.
3.1. Design and Improvement of the Underlying Technology of Blockchain
This component is constructed on the blockchain technology that underpins city mobile pass cards and is separated into incentive and reputation systems. These two modules are described further below.
3.1.1. Incentive Mechanism and Solving Algorithm Design
We examine an e-payment situation for city mobile pass cards on a mobile cloud platform in which customer records are collected from a list of regional gateways and saved on a public cloud or shared with electronic suppliers. Customers’ data and payment history may be included in e-payment records. Customers have a customer ID (CID) and are classified with an area ID depending on the current living area. We suppose in this framework that the mobile sensing network is personal and controlled by its local user (customer). We also suppose that electronic payment managers (EPMs) can be gathered from portable sensing devices by a mobile application incorporated with customers’ smartphones. As a result, a customer’s blockchain address can be written as Addr = AID, CID. Since storing payment records on the blockchain is impractical, we recommend only storing customer addresses on the blockchain, whereas huge payment records are stored on decentralized cloud storage, such as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). A collaborating entity must know customer identifiers that are viewable on the blockchain network to obtain a specific payment record on the cloud. Figure 1 depicts a flowchart of the proposed strategy for electronic payment.
Finally, we suppose that each electronic payment supplier has a cell phone capable of retrieving electronic payment records (EPRs) from the cloud using their unique ID, such as EPID. This allows them to collect payment history on cloud storage for evaluation. We are also creating a cloud blockchain network for the exchange of EPRs. The Ethereum framework was chosen due to its benefits. The following are the primary elements of the proposed cloud blockchain system.(i)Electronic payments manager: The electronic payments manager (EPM) is an important component of our information-sharing platform. It is responsible for supervising overall transaction records on the public blockchain, comprising data storage procedures of mobile access points and mobile user data accessibility. Smart contracts provide this component’s management capacity via stringent user regulations.(ii)Administration unit: This component can be used to control cloud transactions and operations by establishing, updating, or removing access rights. This unit is responsible for smart contract deployment and is the sole entity with the capability to modify or alter smart contract regulations.(iii)Smart contracts: All operations permitted in the access control system are defined by smart contracts. Smart contracts may be interacted with by using the contract location and the application binary interfaces. Through initiating transactions or communications, they may discover, verify, and provide access privileges to mobile electronic customers. All blockchain entities can access the smart contract and its functions. It is essential software in our e-payment system.(iv)Distributed storage: Even though the exchange and storing of large amounts of data on the blockchain is impractical, we use the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a favorable decentralized peer-to-peer file system, to establish a file-sharing framework in the blockchain network [22]. IPFS was created by combining the BitTorrent protocol and the Kademlia Distributed Hash Code. The central server function is abolished in the IPFS system, and users may maintain data in a network of distributed storage devices on the same file system, with benefits over traditional cloud storage including no single point of failure, increased storage throughput, and improved data retrieval [23]. Users may recognize and retrieve the information using IPFS by depending on the cryptographic hashes of their data.(v)Block structure of our proposed scheme: Figure 2 shows a structure of the EPRs block with the below key modules:(vi)Transaction records: Our block’s transactions are grouped into a Merkle tree-based layout, with each leaf node representing a mobile user’s shared data transaction. A mobile user must supply customer information (area ID and customer ID) to build a transaction that is also verified with the user’s private key at a specific moment, including a timestamp, to make a request packet. The purpose of these electronic signatures is to build confidence between both the customer and the cloud server. On other hand, our block header comprises the below metadata to confirm the data block:(vii)Nonce: It is a number created by proof-of-work operations on miner nodes to obtain a hash value less than a certain difficulty level.(viii)Merkle Root: A Merkle tree is a tree wherein every “leaf” is labeled with the cryptographic hash of a block of data and each node that is not a leaf is labeled with the cryptographic hash of its offspring nodes’ labeling. It is a container that stores a set of transactions within every block.(ix)Hash: The Secure Hash Algorithm 256 (SHA-256) is a cryptographic hash algorithm of the SHA-2 family. Following the failure of its predecessor SHA-1, the NSA created it in 2016. SHA-256 has never been hacked and is widely regarded as among the safest cryptographic hash algorithms. As a consequence, it is one of the most widely used cryptographic hash functions in the Bitcoin community. This post will explain how SHA-256 acts and how it will be utilized, especially in Bitcoin. The SHA-256 hash algorithm takes a random size input and creates a fixed-size result. Since hash functions are “one-way,” they are extremely strong. As seen in Figure 3, the hash value may be expressed as follows: HashabDHash(HashaCHashb) D Hash[(Txa.Hash) C (Txb.Hash)].(x)Previous hash: The preceding block’s hash is needed for block verification.(xi)Timestamp: It is the moment when the block was formed. It also contains the timestamp of the most recent transaction in the block.
3.1.2. The Design of Incentive Mechanism Based on Profit Sharing
The classical blockchain technology represented by Bitcoin and Ether uses digital currency as the incentive mechanism, and after each successful mining and confirmation, a new block is generated, and the publicly elected winning bookkeeping node receives the digital currency. Rewarding a segment of the program to the bookkeeper in the form of digital currency implicitly fits the idea of assets in the real world and has led to the rapid development of blockchain technology. However, if the bookkeeping reward incentive of digital currency is considered in the controlled load user-load agent transaction scenario of this paper mechanism, it would be complicating the simple problem, and the price fluctuation of digital currencies would also lead to difficulties in settling electricity transactions. For this reason, this paper considers combining the bookkeeping reward with the financial gain of each load agent. According to the preceding section, load agents are primarily responsible for operating as full nodes on the blockchain chain. This is in charge of preserving the blockchain’s stability and regular bookkeeping; hence, a portion of each load agent’s revenue may be treated as an incentive source, as given in the following equation:where is the incentive received by the bookkeeping node at time , is the economic gain of the user subgroup load agents at time , is the number of load agents, is the profit-sharing ratio given by the load agents to the bookkeeping node, and , if .
3.1.3. Design of Algorithms for Solving Smart Contracts
Solving the above controlled load, the user-load agent decision model is essentially a multiobjective optimization problem. Traditional optimization problems are solved mainly by smart algorithms to solve the Pareto frontier solution set, which has high computational complexity, and its application to the blockchain will reduce the operational efficiency of the blockchain. In this paper, we consider the decomposition-based multiobjective evolutionary algorithm as the solution algorithm for smart contracts, which decomposes the multiobjective problem into a series of single-objective optimization subproblems. Adding this algorithm to the decision model of each blockchain node can effectively reduce the computational complexity and avoid wasting arithmetic power.
3.2. Consensus Algorithm and Blockchain Operation Process
3.2.1. Consensus Algorithm Design Based on Load Agent Effectiveness Function
In the controllable load user-load agent transaction scenario, the controllable load user operates on the blockchain as a light node and does not have bookkeeping capability. Therefore, this paper only needs to consider the competition for bookkeeping rights among load agent nodes based on the load agent’s effectiveness function R (k) described in Section 2. Because the effective function of load agents primarily represents their economic advantages, the higher the benefits, the easier it is to gain blockchain accounting rights; load agents with higher efficacy function values are more likely to obtain bookkeeping rights.
Controllable load users are categorized primarily based on the incoming SOC of electric cars and the temperature setting value of air conditioners in this paper’s optimal scheduling technique. These features directly determine the scheduling capacity of these two types of loads, which will have small advantages for load agents with low scheduling capacity. In summary, the use of blockchain on-chain bookkeeping revenue is considered to dynamically balance the revenue among load agents. Therefore, this paper proposes to use the rate of change of the effectiveness function r (k) shown in equation (2) as the blockchain consensus algorithm, and whether the nodes can obtain the bookkeeping right is mainly based on whether they can sustain their own healthy development.where are the values of the effectiveness function of the user subgroup k load agents at time t and t – 1, respectively.
The main feature of the traditional proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism is that the node does a certain amount of difficult work to produce a result and the verifying party. However, one can easily check whether the node has completed the corresponding work by the result corresponding work; the calculation process is shown in the following equation:where is the 256-bit hash encryption algorithm, is the content of the latest block, is the target difficulty value of hash encryption, and is a random number.
The process of the PoW mechanism is as follows: find an so that the value after satisfying hash encryption is less than . Therefore, the smaller is, the higher the mining difficulty is. Based on the PoW mechanism, this paper combines the above load agent’s effectiveness function to obtain the consensus algorithm designed in this paper as shown in the following equation:
As shown in equation (4), the longer a load agent’s access time to the grid and the higher the rate of change of the efficiency function, the lower the difficulty of its hash calculation and the easier it is to obtain the blockchain bookkeeping rights.
The consensus algorithm that takes into account the change rate of the efficiency function ensures that the bookkeeping rights of each blockchain node are dynamically correlated with its revenue. This contribution to the grid so that the decision-making behavior of each load agent will operate in the direction that is beneficial to the grid operation [20–22].
3.2.2. Operation Process of Blockchain System
Since the duration of the controlled load power trading unit period set in this paper is 1 h, it can be set to generate a block every 1 h. The data structure of the blockchain is shown in Figure 3.
When a transaction is executed, the load agent node with the largest r(k) value completes the bookkeeping and time-stamps the block to prove the validity of all transactions to ensure the traceability of all transactions afterward. The block body mostly comprises the current period’s scheduling outcomes as well as the charging and discharging plans of controlled-load users. Furthermore, it comprises peak and valley reduction plans for load agents in the following period, as well as the effective function of each load agent to prepare for the next block’s consensus method. All the above data are transformed into binary Merkle roots by hashing algorithm and stored in the block header to ensure the privacy of the data. Combining the above blockchain node decision model, incentive mechanism, smart contract solving algorithm, and consensus algorithm, the 24 h operation process of blockchain nodes in this paper can be obtained [24–26].
3.3. Strategic Solutions
3.3.1. Strengthen Technical Innovation
There are certain problems and loopholes in the technology of mobile payment. To reduce the technical risks of mobile payment, the third-party companies should first strengthen the firewall and form a total firewall model. The main role of the firewall is to prevent the generation of Internet risk problems such as network hacking, which can effectively prevent these potential risks. But the firewall is applied in the system of mobile payment, mainly to prevent the company’s system from being infringed, which is not very useful for customers. Therefore, a total firewall system should be established, which can guarantee the security of the company’s payment and also protect the payment security of users. Secondly, mobile payment should add the function of account loss, just like bank cards, which can be used to temporarily freeze the account after the loss of the bank card and then reuse it after the replacement of the card, and mobile payment can also develop this function so that these third-party payment accounts can be lost in time after the loss of cell phones and other mobile terminals to protect the account security and reduce the loss of funds.
3.3.2. Invest in a Perfect Internal Control System
A perfect internal risk prevention and control system is the guarantee of mobile payment. At present, there are still certain problems in domestic mobile payment, and the internal control system is not perfect, which is easy to trigger risks. First of all, all departments should both cooperate and supervise each other in the process of work. The general supervision and management are top-down, but the small number of leaders and large workload and the lack of supervision and management for employees will trigger the occurrence of lax control, so the adoption of departmental supervision can effectively solve this problem and dissolve the risk from within. Secondly, an emergency problem-solving channel should be established to analyze the impact of the risk in a timely and effective manner, and if the impact is large, it needs to be dealt with immediately and transmitted directly to the responsible person through the emergency system so that they can make decisions quickly and minimize the loss caused by the risk. Finally, the third-party payment should strengthen the professional quality training of employees, improve their professionalism, and reduce the chance of their problems in the work process so that the problem can be solved at the root. In addition, the company should also give regular training to employees, teach advanced technology to employees, instill advanced ideas to employees, and make employees have certain professionalism.
3.3.3. Improve the Supervision System
(1) Strengthen Daily Supervision. Internal management is as important as external supervision. Internal management can solve problems at the root, while external supervision can nip problems in the bud and prevent them from generating risks on time. From the standpoint of external supervision, external supervision should first and foremost carry out daily monitoring and management of mobile payment firms. Regularly audit them, uncover problems, repair them on time, and focus on numerous parts of the inspection process, not just one or two, to better avoid and manage risks. Secondly, the supervisory department should strictly monitor some small third-party payment platforms. The smaller the platform, the more primitive the technical means employed, and the greater the likelihood of risk generation. Finally, the monitoring process should focus on the flow of funds because, on the third-party payment platform, customers do not need to withdraw cash; they can only pay through the platform, Numbers will be stored. The oversight department should periodically monitor the flow of funds, and once the use of funds is found to be dangerous, it should be stopped promptly.
(2) Improve the Supervision and Evaluation System. First of all, the regulatory assessment system should be established so that it can be connected with the relevant data information database, such as personal credit information. Secondly, the relevant laws and regulations should be improved. With the explosive development of mobile payment, the relevant domestic laws and regulations are still comprehensive, and the relevant legal documents should be improved gradually for the development of mobile payment so that it can be based on the law. Finally, information technology should be employed to improve internal control. Mobile payment is currently making a significant contribution to the growth of the e-commerce industry. The creation of mobile payments also gives the potential for the growth of e-commerce, and information technology should be utilized to strengthen the capacity to foresee hazards in the process of developing internal risk prevention and control systems [27, 28].
3.3.4. Establishing the Correct Concept of User Use
In the process of mobile payment risk occurrence, there is not only strong company management but also uncontrolled user usage. These are the key reasons and the source of the problem; thus, users should be taught the proper idea of usage and made more conscious of risk prevention. First of all, it should establish the awareness of using security. Many users have the problem of irregularities in the process of using, and the payment password is easily leaked when making payments in some public places, so users should pay attention to the payment environment. Mobile payment should have a scene identification system in place and be working on building a payment connection with businesses. It should gather information about the merchant and comprehend the environment in which the merchant operates. Furthermore, it should warn consumers to be cautious while making payments and to avoid hazards. Second, because the carrier is often cell phones and other electronic items, some customers in the process of utilizing mobile payment will also download certain other software in electronic products. It is probable to cause danger; consumers are frequently perplexed by the notion of mobile payment and social software and do not pay attention to its protection. To address such issues, third-party payment businesses should give some information. In response to such issues, third-party payment businesses could post some information on the official website so that people will hunt for information on the official website rather than clicking on potentially dangerous links. Finally, with the continuous development of third-party payment, the scale is expanding; profits are increasing; more and more enterprises will join them; and there will be some unlawful payment platforms, so users should report and reflect the problems to the relevant departments in time after finding the problems to exclude these industry risks and establish the correct concept of use.
4. Experimental Results and Simulation
To implement our suggested system in operation, we first set up a private Ethereum blockchain on AWS. To construct our e-payment system, we used blockchain technology to install smart contracts, IPFS storage, network entities, and interact with mobile applications. We used these parameters to run the EPMs sharing system and analyze the efficacy of our architecture.
4.1. Performance Evaluation
In this part, we analyze our proposed work by using the NS-2 V2.35 simulator, which was first provided in [29] and demonstrated to be quite successful in [30]. We evaluate the efficacy and functionality of the suggested design by taking into account relevant feasible parameters. NS-2 is a well-known simulation tool that is utilized in a variety of research disciplines, as is a very well-known open-source blockchain plug-in for it [30]. It is among the most advanced network simulators [31]. We simulate for around 10 minutes, throughout which 3,000 electronic transactions take place. The average result is calculated from 50 simulations of our case. The simulation metrics that have been assessed were throughput, time overhead, reaction time, and energy usage.
4.1.1. Throughput
Throughput is described as the number of requests for mobile payment transactions that are fulfilled among connected stakeholders. The throughput of our suggested architecture and the basic model are compared in Figure 4. We increased throughput compared to the basic model because we deployed a dispersed network among linked stakeholders and optimized methods for consumer verification.
4.1.2. Time Overhead
It is described here as the time it takes to complete each verification. Whenever an NS replies to queries, as illustrated in Figure 5, the basic model takes longer to verify than the proposed system because the base model requires multiple reauthentication processes. Furthermore, our design employs modern authentication mechanisms for consumers, stakeholders, and other personnel, resulting in rapid and efficient transmission.
4.1.3. Response Time
It is described here as the time spent capturing health information and updating consumers and stakeholders on new knowledge. We demonstrate an enhancement over the basic approach in our suggested authentication by employing a distinct NS in each associated stakeholder. Figure 6 depicts the typical reaction time in an attached stakeholder to capture mobile electronic payment information and update fresh information of various sizes. We demonstrate that our design has less complexity than the standard approach.
4.1.4. Energy Consumption
IoT devices primarily consider this while creating records or updating payment information on the blockchain. The basic approach for reauthentication across associated stakeholders requires greater energy. In the suggested architecture, we also employ an effective authentication technique for transmitting/receiving data. Our results indicate that our infrastructure is much safer than a base technique owing to the utilization of blockchain and can identify authentication assaults through any NS utilizing our verification algorithm. Furthermore, the suggested design boosts throughput while decreasing energy usage, as well as time overhead and time of response.
4.2. Security Examination
In this part, we look at how authentication may help with secure communication in the designed system.
4.2.1. Threat Investigation
Each design must address security needs such as privacy, authenticity, and availability. As a consequence, they must be addressed in the suggested design for a distributed mobile electronic payment network. Privacy guarantees that only authorized customers and stakeholders have access to the blockchain’s customer information. Authenticity is accountable for transactions transmitted to electronic payment management that have not been tampered with. Customer data that is always available when requested is referred to as availability.
Figure 7 depicts the prospect of a connected stakeholder being attacked. During 500 iterations, the suggested structure and the base model are compared, and the suggested scheme has a greater attack detection rate than the base model.
5. Conclusions
The security and quality of urban mobile pass card electronic payment are closely related to the rights and interests of consumers. Therefore, we must strictly control each process in the process of work, try to unify the payment system of each platform when formulating the payment method, and carry out certain quality checks when the payment system is initially established. The only way to better protect the rights and interests of consumers is to continuously improve the system of urban mobile pass card electronic payment, develop appropriate pass one payment standards, and reach a consistent mobile payment method among all platforms. On the whole, blockchain technology is technologically advanced in the field of financial mobile payment and has the characteristics of nontampering, the recording process, and high trust in protecting payment privacy information, tracing capital flow, reducing currency issuance cost, reducing cross-border settlement cost, and so on. Blockchain realizes the whole process data from customer entry to settlement on the chain. It can improve the efficiency of business reconciliation, realize multipoint disaster preparedness, ensure the security of data transmission, protect user data privacy, and make the entire business process traceable, while users’ digital identities can be linked with other industries to create a win-win ecosystem of Internet-based mobile payment and promote the upgrade of the mobile payment industry in the financial sector.
Data Availability
The experimental data used to support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest regarding this work.