Design of an Efficient and Secure Smart City Framework Using Blockchain

Abstract

Building smart services for smart cities has become a major focus in modern technological advancements. Mobile scanners play a crucial role in capturing and processing data from various sources. Smart city applications emphasize the need for secure data sharing across heterogeneous devices. However, certain actions taken during data sharing can pose risks to security, privacy, and data integrity. The reliance on a centralized repository has been a major factor in past securitybreaches. Therefore, ensuringsecureauthenticationand the protectionof sensitivedata is crucial formodern applications. Blockchainisawidelyadoptedtechnologythatensuresdataintegrityandsecurity.Thispaperintroducesanovelblockchainbasedframework,SecPrivPreserve,designedtoenhancethesecurityandintegrityofdatageneratedbymobilescanners.Theproposedframeworksecuresdatathroughmultiplephases,includinginitialization,registration,dataprotection,authentication,accesscontrol,validation,datasharing,andsecuredownloads.Tostrengthensecurity,SecPrivPreserveintegratesvariousmechanismssuchasencryption,hashing,andauthenticationtechniquesthatenhanceconfidentiality,privacy,andintegrity.Unliketraditional approachesthat rely on one-time passwords(OTP) for authenticationand data sharing,this frameworkemploys QR codesforsecureaccessand datasharingkeystofurtherenhancesecurity.SincetheSecPrivPreserveframeworkisbuiltonapermissionedblockchain,itinherentlybenefitsfromtamper-proofrecordsandnon-repudiation.Moreover, for data protection techniquesto enhance cryptographicsecurity.

Introduction

The global push toward smart technologies aims to improve people’s lives, with the Internet of Things (IoT) playing a key role by connecting physical devices and enabling data transfer across sectors like healthcare, manufacturing, finance, traffic, and energy. IoT’s compactness and low power consumption drive its rapid growth, with an expected market value of $1.4 trillion by 2027. Smart city initiatives, such as China’s 220+ projects, use IoT and associated technologies to manage urban operations and improve citizens' quality of life by creating instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent urban environments.

However, IoT devices face security and privacy challenges due to inconsistent protocols, limited computing power, and centralized data repositories, making smart cities vulnerable to cyberattacks like data fabrication, denial-of-service, and data poisoning. Existing security measures often fall short because of IoT’s heterogeneity and resource constraints. Simple cryptographic frameworks tailored to IoT’s needs are necessary to secure data during storage, transmission, and sharing while complying with regulatory policies.

To address these issues, blockchain technology emerges as a promising solution by providing decentralized, tamper-proof data management. Blockchain-based frameworks can improve privacy and security in smart city applications, overcoming limitations of centralized cloud systems. Smart contracts automate trust and workflows, further enhancing security and efficiency.

The document also reviews recent studies on blockchain applications in Industry 4.0 and IIoT environments, emphasizing blockchain’s potential to secure industrial IoT through access control and trusted data management.

The proposed project, SecPrivPreserve, is a blockchain-based framework designed to enhance security, privacy, and data integrity in IoT-based smart cities. It includes modules for user registration, membership service providers, authority management, smart contracts, and clients, facilitating secure data sharing and access through encryption, OTPs, hashing, and QR code techniques.

Conclusion

In this paper, Blockchain secures and anonymizes IoT and its applications. Smart city challenges include user security, privacy, bandwidth, anonymity, and scalability. Therefore, this study proposes a blockchain-based SecPrivPreserve system. The presented framework ensures the privacy and safety of the user’s data throughout processing. In the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain, information is summarized, and specific features of business transmission are systematized based on the model. Initialization, registration, data protection, authentication, data access control, validation, data sharing and download comprise in SecPrivPreserve framework.Security features include passwords, OTP, encryption, hashing, digital signature, Chebyshev polynomials, and interpolation. Cutting-edge experiments demonstratedthatSecPrivPreserveoutperformedstate-of-the-artsystemsinresponsiveness,processingtime, encryption quality, and detection rate. However, the experimentation was carried out through Fabric SDK, and the obtainedresultsshowthattheproposedframeworkreducescomputationaltimeandresponsiveness

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Bogaraju Archana, Malakadi Spandana, Bolli Vijith Kumar, Mr. CH. Gopi. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.