Toward a Trustless Smart City: the #SmartME Experience

Abstract

A Smart City is an example of a domain where citizens and institutions, at any level, should be empowered by actually decentralizing any mechanism and process that can escape single-authority control and the grip of centrally-managed bureaucracies, while at the same time not relying on any single party trusting any other. In line with this key insight, in this paper, we have designed and implemented a decentralized, trustless system for (environmental) sensing data acquisition, storage, and consumption, in the context of a real-world Smart City deployment and with the participation of independent, institutional, stakeholders. This Open Data system has been extended with an end-user wizard for user-friendly and trustless (i.e., independent) data audit. The acquisition layer requires nodes to authenticate when sending readings. Last but not least, the storage layer is again trustless, as institutions can pool together their resources, without trusting one another, nor entrusting the administration of the system to any third party.