Date of Award

8-24-2023

Thesis Type

PhD

Document Type

Thesis

Divisions

Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology

Department

Department of Computer system & Technology

Institution

Universiti Malaya

Abstract

A smart city is primarily an urban region that makes effective use of contemporary technology to manage its resources, assets, and services. Internet of Things (IoT) devices and sensors are installed throughout the smart city in order to facilitate remote monitoring and data collection in relation to a variety of key infrastructures. The data is then utilised to plan the necessary maintenance tasks to ensure that citizens receive high-quality services. Even though IoT devices make it possible to collect data in real-time in a smart city, most sensors and IoT devices do not have a lot of storage space or processing power. Therefore, separate data storage is needed for long-term storage and use in the future. Cloud computing is a popular way for sensors and IoT data in a smart city to be stored and processed by a third party. On the other hand, the cloud is regarded as an untrustworthy third party due to the fact that data might be inspected in an unlawful manner by the cloud service provider, and the privacy of data is at risk. In addition, cloud computing and storage services are dependent on centralised mechanisms in order to function properly, which makes them more vulnerable to attack. The attacker can easily deploy illegitimate IoT devices or sensors to produce fallacious data and messages. Furthermore, the attacker can infiltrate sensors or IoT devices placed in various smart city entities and modify data to disrupt smooth services. The current cloud-based infrastructure does not ensure the reliability of the obtained data. Furthermore, sensors and IoT devices from different vendors have different data formats. As a result, data should be transformed into a compatible format to avoid interoperability difficulties. The blockchain is a disruptive technology that shows promise as a potential answer to the problem of securing data against tampering in the context of smart city applications. However, cross-chain compatibility is one of the primary impediments to widespread adoption of blockchain applications. It is challenging to bring all of the organisations that make up a smart city under a single blockchain network because it may introduce privacy risks. Each node in a blockchain network for a smart city could represent a different entity operating within the smart city. Each node stores both the plaintext and the hash value of all data. Thus, an entity can access information belonging to another entity. Every entity operates autonomously and may benefit from its own private blockchain to store and secure sensitive information. Furthermore, the different entities may have different platforms for blockchain and transaction formats, thereby introducing interoperability. In this research, we present a novel blockchain-based approach for addressing the security, trust, and data heterogeneity issues faced by various entities in a smart cities. Unlike existing blockchain techniques, our method proposes the new Blockchain-as-a-Middleware (BaaM). The BaaM is a hierarchical blockchain that will manage the security, trust, heterogeneity, and interoperability issues between the blockchains and IoT devices in the smart city. The functional verification of BaaM has been benchmarked through a Hyperledger Fabric proof-of-concept for evaluating the performance of the proposed model. The simulation and functional experiments prove that the obtained performance evaluation demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed blockchain as a middleware model. This research has confirmed that a commitment to decentralisation and blockchain middleware for data management is critical to the predictable, reliable, and immutable negotiation of the IoT-enabled network in order to meet the broad and diverse needs of the smart city and its future development. Hence, the proposed BaaM solution has been presented as a unified standard for future application as both a decision-support tool and an instrument capable of bridging the gaps between proprietary network solutions in the IoT application within smart city solutions.

Initial

khm

Additional Information

Thesis (PhD) – Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology, Universiti Malaya, 2023.

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