Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has revolutionized several industries (e.g., manufacturing, health, transport, education, among others) by allowing objects to connect to the Internet and, thus, enabling a variety of novel applications. In this sense, IoT devices have become an essential component of smart cities, allowing many novel and useful services, but, at the same time, bringing numerous cybersecurity threats. The paper at hand proposes BlockSIEM, a blockchain-based and distributed Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution framework for the protection of the aforementioned smart city services. The proposed SIEM relies on blockchain technology to securely store and access security events. Such security events are generated by IoT sentinels that are in charge of shielding groups of IoT devices. The IoT sentinels may be deployed in smart city scenarios, such as smart hospitals, smart transport systems, smart airports, among others, ensuring a satisfactory level of protection. The blockchain guarantees the non-repudiation and traceability of the registry of security events due to its features. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, our proposal is implemented using Ethereum and validated through different use cases and experiments.
Highlights
A smart city aims to solve challenges that are caused by population growth in urban areas, e.g., physical security, residual management, and transportation systems, using technology to interconnect governmental organizations and allowing citizens access to multiple services, which supports a way to efficiently and transparently manage different public resources [1]
Smart cities are increasingly becoming a reality nowadays, and their advanced services towards citizens often rely on Internet of Things (IoT) devices
By leveraging the benefits of blockchains, this paper presented BlockSIEM as a tool to contribute directly to the safety of IoT ecosystems by strictly managing the security events stemming from the IoT Sentinels shielding a given group of IoT devices and preserving integrity and non-repudiation
Summary
A smart city aims to solve challenges that are caused by population growth in urban areas, e.g., physical security, residual management, and transportation systems, using technology to interconnect governmental organizations and allowing citizens access to multiple services, which supports a way to efficiently and transparently manage different public resources [1]. Technology offers low cost and effective solutions for the development of smart cities due to its high applicability in an uncountable number of scenarios [2,3]. The intelligent IoT devices can continuously collaborate in various sectors of a smart city scenario, exchanging a constant flow of information to offer quality services to citizens as an ultimate goal [4,5]. Blockchain is a decentralized P2P network where all generated transactions are validated by the registered nodes and recorded in a distributed and immutable ledger [13]. In this context, the consensus algorithm is the core of the blockchain technology, as it guarantees the reliability of the network. Some of the most common consensus types are presented [15]: Proof of Work (PoW): a transaction is approved if at least half plus one of the nodes accept it in the P2P network.
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