Publication

Abstract : A Smart City is a next generation city where it uses information and communication technologies(ICT) to provide numerous services and amenities with improved efficiency and reliability in a hierarchical manner. Despite the benefits, securing smart cities is of paramount importance for safeguarding communications from malicious entities and preserving user privacy. Thus a need for developing a security framework for smart cities becomes necessary for integrating smart city services and platforms in a hierarchical manner. In this paper, we develop an identity based security framework for smart cities. The proposed framework leverages the hierarchical nature of smart cities and builds a pseudonym-based key management scheme that uses identities as public keys. Our approach replaces the traditional Public Key Infrastructure in smart cities thus providing improved benefits in terms of security, reliability and efficiency. Evaluation of the proposed scheme shows that our approach is lightweight compared to traditional public key infrastructure and that it eliminates the problem of single point of failure in Private Key Generators (PKG).