Leveraging Blockchain for Secure IoT Device Communication in Smart Cities

In this paper we focus on utilising blockchain for IoT devices in smart cities to meet the major issues including security, scalability and energy consumption. A permissioned blockchain architecture with a light-weight consensus model is discussed for implementing a Decentralized and Secure IoT Internet. It encompasses data gathering from different IoT devices, design of the blockchain network and assessment of its performance in a simulated smart city context. Static analysis show that the proposed solution provides protection against various types of IoT attacks and has a similar performance to the traditional networks, with latencies and energy consumption only slightly increased. From the works done, the proposal that blockchain has the potential to offer security and efficiency in the IoT communications in future smart city applications emerges.