Guaranteeing information integrity and access control in smart cities through blockchain

Abstract

The distributed devices in a smart city are characterized by different degrees of sensitivity. Some of them can be accessed by everyone whereas others are limited to a specific class of users (subjects). Therefore, we created an access control system named $\mathbb {SOT-S}$ (Subject-Object-Task System) supported by blockchains that sort processes applied by subjects on smart devices. $\mathbb {SOT-S}$ depends on three entities: subjects, objects and tasks. It determines if subjects have the access’s rights to objects or not, and also it defines the priorities among the subjects. $\mathbb {SOT-S}$ principles are applied through an equation that takes the values of the three entities. To increase the level of trust and maintain the information integrity on the system, the values associated to the entities and the access control rules are managed through a blockchain mechanism. To ensure the applicability of the proposed solution, we developed a test environment to integrate the proposed concepts. In addition, we created a network integrating the developed components where the architecture was built through smooth operations. Compared to the existing solutions, the evaluated parameters of our system components are protected from damages by blockchain technology. Also, $\mathbb {SOT-S}$ paradigm is easy to understand, implement, and deploy. Further, it assigns a value of trust to a given task/action executed by a subject on an object.