Blockchain based secure smart city architecture using low resource IoTs

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is growing exponentially in research and industry. Although, many standard and conventional security solutions have been provided for IoT, it suffers from many privacy and security concerns. Standard security protocols are not suitable for majority of IoT devices because of its decentralized topology and resource-constraints. Blockchain (BC) finds its efficient application in IoT to preserve the five basic cryptographic primitives, such as confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, availability and non-repudiation. Adoption of conventional BC in IoT causes high energy consumption, delay and computational overheads which are not appropriate for various resource constrained IoT devices. To mitigate these problems, this work proposes a smart access control framework in a public and a private BC for a smart city application which makes it more efficient and secure as compared to the existing IoT applications. The proposed IoT based smart city architecture adopts BC technology for preserving all the cryptographic security and privacy issues. Moreover, proposed BC has minimal overhead as well. This work investigates the existing threat models and critical access control issues which handle multiple permissions of various processing nodes of IoT environment and detects relevant inconsistencies. Comparison in terms of all security issues with existing literature shows that the proposed architecture is competitively efficient in terms of security access control. The primary goal of this research article is to explore the possibility of BC as an alternative to standard security solutions for low resource IoT applications.