A Blockchain-Based Architecture and Framework for Cybersecure Smart Cities

Abstract

A smart city is one that uses digital technologies and other means to improve the quality of life of its citizens and reduce the cost of municipal services. Smart cities primarily use IoT to collect and analyze data to interact directly with the city’s infrastructure and monitor city assets and community developments in real time to improve operational efficiency and proactively respond to potential problems and challenges. Today, cybersecurity is considered one of the main challenges facing smart cities. Over the past few years, the cybersecurity research community has devoted a great deal of attention to this challenge. Among the different technologies proposed to address this challenge, Blockchain appears to offer the security and data privacy needed to enhance smart cities security. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework and architecture based on Blockchain, big data and artificial intelligence to improve smart cities cybersecurity. For the sake of illustration of the proposed framework, simulation results are presented for a smart grid dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, demonstrating its potential and efficiency to deal with cybersecurity challenges in smart cities.