Recovering Decentralized Critical Archival Data From Tampering in Smart City Environment Using Blockchain

Abstract

A large modern organization usually has a large number of computers and smart devices continuously deployed to store and share critical data among the users inside and outside the organization. Critical data storage needs to be secure and scalable for such an organization. While current cloud-based services offer a centralized view and control over the IT operations of these smart devices, it is prone to attacks, data tampering, and rogue administrator problems. In this paper, an approach using blockchain to recovering critical data from tampering is presented. Although our approach incurs a large amount of overhead due to the use of blockchain, our approach is shown to recover the critical data from all the data tampering. Simulation of our approach used in a smart city environment is conducted to show that the overhead of our approach is compared favorably with that of using a centralized cloud-based approach. Our approach is suitable for recovering critical archival data, instead of real-time data, because the speed is not a very important factor for recovering critical archival data from tampering.