Privacy protection in smart cities by a personal data management protocol in blockchain

Abstract

Due to the increase of cybercrime and security risks in computer networks as well as violations of user privacy, it is essential to upgrade the existing protection models and provide practical solutions to meet these challenges. An example of these risks is the presence of a third party between users and various services, which leads to the collection and control of large amounts of users' personal information and the possibility of their databases being misused or hacked. Blockchain technology and encrypted currencies have so far shown that a decentralized network of peer-to-peer users, along with a general ledger, can do reliable computing. So, in this article, we are going to introduce a protocol that converts the blockchain network to an automated access control manager without the presence of a third party. To this end, we designed a mutual authentication protocol to create a secure channel between the user and the service and then demonstrate its accuracy and completeness using the Gong-Nidham-Yahalom belief logic [1]. The results of our evaluations show that our proposed protocol is secure enough to be used on the blockchain network and attackers are unable to penetrate, track, impersonate, inject, misrepresent or distort information using the common attacks.