Authentication and Digitization of IoT devices in Smart Cities

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IoT-enabled smart devices have become an essential part of the smart city architectures, which establishes all the underlying architectures to operate altogether, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), Internet of Cyber-Physical Things (IoCPT), and Internet of Everything (IoE). Similarly, these underlying architectures constitute a system to realize the concept of smart cities and, ultimately, a smart planet. A private blockchain-based architecture, Decentralized Smart City of Things (DSCoT), has been proposed in this study, which utilizes Blockchain tokenization (i.e., Non-fungible tokens-NFTs) for the representation and authentication of user and IoT assets by defining smart device attributes. Through NFTs, the uniqueness of the IoT assets and users has been realized, which helps digitize these assets as non-interchangeable units of data stored on a digital ledger. The proposed architecture ensures this functionality of unique assets representation by deploying smart contracts and further for IoT assets and user authentication. The mechanism provides security services such as confidentiality, integrity (using SHA-III one-way encryption), availability, and authorization (CIA).

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