Securing Smart Cities: IoT Authentication and Blockchain Integration

By: Soo Nee Kee1,2

1Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

2International Center for AI and Cyber Security Research and Innovations, Asia University, Taiwan Email: nee.kee2001.nks@gmail.com

Abstract

The implementation of smart cities connects various systems together, such as smart governance and citizen engagement, smart healthcare, smart homes, and smart transportation, making cities more intelligent. The integration of these systems allows seamless data exchange, enhances efficiency and decision making, and improves quality of life and city economy. For instance, smart healthcare provides real-time monitoring on patients’ conditions remotely, ensuring patients’ health and avoiding any emergencies. Smart transportation allows citizens to track the arrival time of public transports, reduces road congestion through real-time data analysis. Smart governance enhances the transparency by allowing citizens to participate in decision-making processes. All smart devices and infrastructures are interconnected to communicate and share data. Due to the increasing number of interconnected devices, the authentication problem becomes more important to prevent unauthorized access. Therefore, the integration of blockchain with IoT is proposed to improve security of smart cities and strengthen authentication mechanism.

Keywords: Smart city, Blockchain, IoT, Authentication, Security, ABE

Introduction

Blockchain is a decentralized ledger that stores data in a distributed manner. Same data will be stored across each note in the blockchain, preventing single point of failure. This means that any failure of nodes in the blockchain will not affect the storing and retrieval of data from blockchain. Each block connects the previous blocks via cryptographic chain, avoiding the tampering and deleting of data, enhancing the security and transparency of the system, and fostering users’ trust. [1] There are three types of blockchain: public chain, private chain and federated chain. Public chain is permissionless which means everyone can access the blockchain such as Ethereum or Bitcoin. Private chain is permissioned blockchain that only allows authorities to access while federated chain is permissioned blockchain managed by a group of organizations. Federated chain is used to build a smart city as there are various stakeholders involved in smart cities such as public and private organizations, healthcare sectors, transportation systems, firms and companies. Federated chain allows these entities to collaborate and share control of the data while ensuring only authorized users can access the data. [2]

Techniques

Authentication mechanism of smart cities can be strengthened by integrating IoT devices with blockchain. There are six main entities in this proposed system: smart city devices, fog layer, blockchain, cloud computing, data users and data owners. Smart devices are the infrastructure, sensors and cameras that are used in a city to monitor the cities and track anomalies. The fog nodes normally are placed near IoT devices to collect data from IoT devices. Besides, fog nodes have the computation abilities to perform simple data processing and data filtering, allowing the system to respond to the abnormal in real-time, as well as reduce network latency. [2] The filtered data will be encrypted by using attribute-based encryption (ABE), which strengthens authentication by allowing authorized users who match the access policies to access data. Data owners set policies to govern the access rights of users. Once the data is encrypted, it will be stored securely in the blockchain.

Blockchain can enhance security and strengthen authentication of smart cities as the data stored in the blockchain is immutable. Users cannot change, modify or delete the data. In addition, smart contracts automates the enforcement of access policies. Smart contracts helps verify the user and device credentials in real-time, allowing access once the authentication is successful. Automation provides a seamless authentication process across smart city applications. Besides, cloud computing is an essential component in a smart city. Cloud computing provides the robust computation capability to support advanced computational tasks like machine learning and data analysis for larger datasets. By using cloud computing can effectively improve the performance of smart city decision-making and management.

A diagram of a cloud computing process

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Figure 1: Overview of the Smart Cities

Conclusion

In conclusion, the integration of blockchain technology and IoT devices can strengthen the authentication of a smart city due to the immutability, transparency and traceability nature of the blockchain. ABE further improves the security of smart cities by ensuring only authorized users can access data. The use of smart contracts provides the automation for authentication process and eliminates the need of third parties, enhancing the overall performance of the system.

Reference

  1. “Exploring the integration of edge computing and blockchain IoT: Principles, architectures, security, and applications – ScienceDirect.” Accessed: Oct. 04, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1084804524000614
  2. “Blockchain-based cloud-fog collaborative smart home authentication scheme – ScienceDirect.” Accessed: Oct. 08, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389128624000720
  3. Mourelle, L. M. (2022). Robotics and AI for Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure in Smart Cities. N. Nedjah, A. A. Abd El-Latif, & B. B. Gupta (Eds.). Springer.
  4. Keesari, T., Goyal, M. K., Gupta, B., Kumar, N., Roy, A., Sinha, U. K., … & Goyal, R. K. (2021). Big data and environmental sustainability based integrated framework for isotope hydrology applications in India. Environmental Technology & Innovation, 24, 101889.
  5. A. Gaurav, B. B. Gupta, C. -H. Hsu, D. Peraković and F. J. García Peñalvo, “Deep Learning Based Approach for Secure Web of Things (WoT),” 2021 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC Workshops), Montreal, QC, Canada, 2021, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/ICCWorkshops50388.2021.9473677.

Cite As

Kee S.N. (2024) Securing Smart Cities: IoT Authentication and Blockchain Integration, Insights2Techinfo, pp.1

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