Challenges and Opportunities in Smart City Network Management Through Blockchain and Cloud Computing

Abstract

With the idea of new developing technologies and the rapid change in our technical environment, there is a need for smarter, more efficient technology to keep up with the needs of today's world. Thus, the idea of smart cities has come into being. The purpose of this chapter is to promote the idea of building a smart city and providing a framework for future development of the same. We are moving towards a more futuristic world where everything is connected and done over the internet, which will create more network dependency. The problem with the concept of smart cities is the need for better technologies to improve the system of data transfer to address the problem of trust in the system, as massive amounts of people's private data is at stake with bad actors trying to hack the system to gain access to it. There is also the problem of the massive amounts of data produced in smart cities, so there is a need to provide a framework to efficiently store all the data. These problems can be solved with the help of technologies such as blockchain and cloud computing. Cloud computing can be seen as a way of sharing resources offering compute, storage, databases, and network services that can be used on a larger scale. Cloud computing stores massive amounts of data, it can also be used to share and transfer data between networks in a cloud, it is cost-effective, and you can also retrieve lost data or backup data when needed. Despite cloud computing being so great, it also has its own drawbacks. The problem of security in cloud storage is ever-increasing; since cloud storage, centralized systems have been a major target for hackers and data breaches, and the data in the cloud can be tampered with and accessed by unauthorized users. If data is being transferred through the cloud it can be intercepted during transmission because of the problem of encryption. These problems can be solved as well as the system being improved and made faster with the help of blockchain. Blockchain is a database or ledger that is shared across a network. The ledger is encrypted so that only people who are authorized can access the data. Blockchain will decentralize the data stored, which will improve the security of the data immensely. If a hacker targets a single block in a node, it will not have much effect and will continue to function. Block chain works by breaking the data into smaller chunks, and the chunks are distributed in a way that even if the network is down the data will still be available. While a file is being shared it is broken into smaller pieces and sent in a way that the file transfer is quicker. The files are encrypted using a cryptographic hash table and each individual shard or part of the file is also encrypted, making the security even tighter. With the help of blockchain, the storage of files will become much cheaper and more secure. A framework is provided to manage and secure the data acquired from IoT devices through encryption using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm and storing the data in a private or public cloud depending on the data; and then decrypting the data and sending it to the users who requested the data or for further analysis. This chapter provides a framework for a smart city storage and security model and can be used as a prototype model for future development in the field.