Showing papers on "Cloud computing published in 2016"

Edge Computing: Vision and Challenges

Abstract: The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) and the success of rich cloud services have pushed the horizon of a new computing paradigm, edge computing, which calls for processing the data at the edge of the network. Edge computing has the potential to address the concerns of response time requirement, battery life constraint, bandwidth cost saving, as well as data safety and privacy. In this paper, we introduce the definition of edge computing, followed by several case studies, ranging from cloud offloading to smart home and city, as well as collaborative edge to materialize the concept of edge computing. Finally, we present several challenges and opportunities in the field of edge computing, and hope this paper will gain attention from the community and inspire more research in this direction.

Efficient Multi-User Computation Offloading for Mobile-Edge Cloud Computing

Abstract: Mobile-edge cloud computing is a new paradigm to provide cloud computing capabilities at the edge of pervasive radio access networks in close proximity to mobile users. In this paper, we first study the multi-user computation offloading problem for mobile-edge cloud computing in a multi-channel wireless interference environment. We show that it is NP-hard to compute a centralized optimal solution, and hence adopt a game theoretic approach for achieving efficient computation offloading in a distributed manner. We formulate the distributed computation offloading decision making problem among mobile device users as a multi-user computation offloading game. We analyze the structural property of the game and show that the game admits a Nash equilibrium and possesses the finite improvement property. We then design a distributed computation offloading algorithm that can achieve a Nash equilibrium, derive the upper bound of the convergence time, and quantify its efficiency ratio over the centralized optimal solutions in terms of two important performance metrics. We further extend our study to the scenario of multi-user computation offloading in the multi-channel wireless contention environment. Numerical results corroborate that the proposed algorithm can achieve superior computation offloading performance and scale well as the user size increases.

Fog and IoT: An Overview of Research Opportunities

Abstract: Fog is an emergent architecture for computing, storage, control, and networking that distributes these services closer to end users along the cloud-to-things continuum. It covers both mobile and wireline scenarios, traverses across hardware and software, resides on network edge but also over access networks and among end users, and includes both data plane and control plane. As an architecture, it supports a growing variety of applications, including those in the Internet of Things (IoT), fifth-generation (5G) wireless systems, and embedded artificial intelligence (AI). This survey paper summarizes the opportunities and challenges of fog, focusing primarily in the networking context of IoT.

Network Function Virtualization: State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges

Abstract: Network function virtualization (NFV) has drawn significant attention from both industry and academia as an important shift in telecommunication service provisioning. By decoupling network functions (NFs) from the physical devices on which they run, NFV has the potential to lead to significant reductions in operating expenses (OPEX) and capital expenses (CAPEX) and facilitate the deployment of new services with increased agility and faster time-to-value. The NFV paradigm is still in its infancy and there is a large spectrum of opportunities for the research community to develop new architectures, systems and applications, and to evaluate alternatives and trade-offs in developing technologies for its successful deployment. In this paper, after discussing NFV and its relationship with complementary fields of software defined networking (SDN) and cloud computing, we survey the state-of-the-art in NFV, and identify promising research directions in this area. We also overview key NFV projects, standardization efforts, early implementations, use cases, and commercial products.

CryptoNets: applying neural networks to encrypted data with high throughput and accuracy

Abstract: Applying machine learning to a problem which involves medical, financial, or other types of sensitive data, not only requires accurate predictions but also careful attention to maintaining data privacy and security. Legal and ethical requirements may prevent the use of cloud-based machine learning solutions for such tasks. In this work, we will present a method to convert learned neural networks to CryptoNets, neural networks that can be applied to encrypted data. This allows a data owner to send their data in an encrypted form to a cloud service that hosts the network. The encryption ensures that the data remains confidential since the cloud does not have access to the keys needed to decrypt it. Nevertheless, we will show that the cloud service is capable of applying the neural network to the encrypted data to make encrypted predictions, and also return them in encrypted form. These encrypted predictions can be sent back to the owner of the secret key who can decrypt them. Therefore, the cloud service does not gain any information about the raw data nor about the prediction it made. We demonstrate CryptoNets on the MNIST optical character recognition tasks. CryptoNets achieve 99% accuracy and can make around 59000 predictions per hour on a single PC. Therefore, they allow high throughput, accurate, and private predictions.

Implementing smart factory of Industrie 4.0: an outlook

Abstract: With the application of Internet of Things and services to manufacturing, the fourth stage of industrialization, referred to as Industrie 4.0, is believed to be approaching. For Industrie 4.0 to come true, it is essential to implement the horizontal integration of inter-corporation value network, the end-to-end integration of engineering value chain, and the vertical integration of factory inside. In this paper, we focus on the vertical integration to implement flexible and reconfigurable smart factory. We first propose a brief framework that incorporates industrial wireless networks, cloud, and fixed or mobile terminals with smart artifacts such as machines, products, and conveyors. Then, we elaborate the operational mechanism from the perspective of control engineering, that is, the smart artifacts form a self-organized system which is assisted with the feedback and coordination blocks that are implemented on the cloud and based on the big data analytics. In addition, we outline the main technical features and beneficial outcomes and present a detailed design scheme. We conclude that the smart factory of Industrie 4.0 is achievable by extensively applying the existing enabling technologies while actively coping with the technical challenges.

A Secure and Dynamic Multi-Keyword Ranked Search Scheme over Encrypted Cloud Data

Abstract: Due to the increasing popularity of cloud computing, more and more data owners are motivated to outsource their data to cloud servers for great convenience and reduced cost in data management. However, sensitive data should be encrypted before outsourcing for privacy requirements, which obsoletes data utilization like keyword-based document retrieval. In this paper, we present a secure multi-keyword ranked search scheme over encrypted cloud data, which simultaneously supports dynamic update operations like deletion and insertion of documents. Specifically, the vector space model and the widely-used TF $\;\times\;$ IDF model are combined in the index construction and query generation. We construct a special tree-based index structure and propose a “Greedy Depth-first Search” algorithm to provide efficient multi-keyword ranked search. The secure kNN algorithm is utilized to encrypt the index and query vectors, and meanwhile ensure accurate relevance score calculation between encrypted index and query vectors. In order to resist statistical attacks, phantom terms are added to the index vector for blinding search results. Due to the use of our special tree-based index structure, the proposed scheme can achieve sub-linear search time and deal with the deletion and insertion of documents flexibly. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme.

The Promise of Edge Computing

Abstract: The success of the Internet of Things and rich cloud services have helped create the need for edge computing, in which data processing occurs in part at the network edge, rather than completely in the cloud. Edge computing could address concerns such as latency, mobile devices' limited battery life, bandwidth costs, security, and privacy.

Fog Computing: Helping the Internet of Things Realize Its Potential

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) could enable innovations that enhance the quality of life, but it generates unprecedented amounts of data that are difficult for traditional systems, the cloud, and even edge computing to handle. Fog computing is designed to overcome these limitations.

Ultra-Dense Networks: A Survey

Abstract: The exponential growth and availability of data in all forms is the main booster to the continuing evolution in the communications industry. The popularization of traffic-intensive applications including high definition video, 3-D visualization, augmented reality, wearable devices, and cloud computing defines a new era of mobile communications. The immense amount of traffic generated by today’s customers requires a paradigm shift in all aspects of mobile networks. Ultradense network (UDN) is one of the leading ideas in this racetrack. In UDNs, the access nodes and/or the number of communication links per unit area are densified. In this paper, we provide a survey-style introduction to dense small cell networks. Moreover, we summarize and compare some of the recent achievements and research findings. We discuss the modeling techniques and the performance metrics widely used to model problems in UDN. Also, we present the enabling technologies for network densification in order to understand the state-of-the-art. We consider many research directions in this survey, namely, user association, interference management, energy efficiency, spectrum sharing, resource management, scheduling, backhauling, propagation modeling, and the economics of UDN deployment. Finally, we discuss the challenges and open problems to the researchers in the field or newcomers who aim to conduct research in this interesting and active area of research.

Mobile-Edge Computing: Partial Computation Offloading Using Dynamic Voltage Scaling

Abstract: The incorporation of dynamic voltage scaling technology into computation offloading offers more flexibilities for mobile edge computing. In this paper, we investigate partial computation offloading by jointly optimizing the computational speed of smart mobile device (SMD), transmit power of SMD, and offloading ratio with two system design objectives: energy consumption of SMD minimization (ECM) and latency of application execution minimization (LM). Considering the case that the SMD is served by a single cloud server, we formulate both the ECM problem and the LM problem as nonconvex problems. To tackle the ECM problem, we recast it as a convex one with the variable substitution technique and obtain its optimal solution. To address the nonconvex and nonsmooth LM problem, we propose a locally optimal algorithm with the univariate search technique. Furthermore, we extend the scenario to a multiple cloud servers system, where the SMD could offload its computation to a set of cloud servers. In this scenario, we obtain the optimal computation distribution among cloud servers in closed form for the ECM and LM problems. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate that our proposed algorithms can significantly reduce the energy consumption and shorten the latency with respect to the existing offloading schemes.

Vehicular Fog Computing: A Viewpoint of Vehicles as the Infrastructures

Abstract: With the emergence of ever-growing advanced vehicular applications, the challenges to meet the demands from both communication and computation are increasingly prominent. Without powerful communication and computational support, various vehicular applications and services will still stay in the concept phase and cannot be put into practice in the daily life. Thus, solving this problem is of great importance. The existing solutions, such as cellular networks, roadside units (RSUs), and mobile cloud computing, are far from perfect because they highly depend on and bear the cost of additional infrastructure deployment. Given tremendous number of vehicles in urban areas, putting these underutilized vehicular resources into use offers great opportunity and value. Therefore, we conceive the idea of utilizing vehicles as the infrastructures for communication and computation, named vehicular fog computing (VFC), which is an architecture that utilizes a collaborative multitude of end-user clients or near-user edge devices to carry out communication and computation, based on better utilization of individual communication and computational resources of each vehicle. By aggregating abundant resources of individual vehicles, the quality of services and applications can be enhanced greatly. In particular, by discussing four types of scenarios of moving and parked vehicles as the communication and computational infrastructures, we carry on a quantitative analysis of the capacities of VFC. We unveil an interesting relationship among the communication capability, connectivity, and mobility of vehicles, and we also find out the characteristics about the pattern of parking behavior, which benefits from the understanding of utilizing the vehicular resources. Finally, we discuss the challenges and open problems in implementing the proposed VFC system as the infrastructures. Our study provides insights for this novel promising paradigm, as well as research topics about vehicular information infrastructures.

Optimal Workload Allocation in Fog-Cloud Computing Toward Balanced Delay and Power Consumption

Abstract: Mobile users typically have high demand on localized and location-based information services. To always retrieve the localized data from the remote cloud, however, tends to be inefficient, which motivates fog computing. The fog computing, also known as edge computing, extends cloud computing by deploying localized computing facilities at the premise of users, which prestores cloud data and distributes to mobile users with fast-rate local connections. As such, fog computing introduces an intermediate fog layer between mobile users and cloud, and complements cloud computing toward low-latency high-rate services to mobile users. In this fundamental framework, it is important to study the interplay and cooperation between the edge (fog) and the core (cloud). In this paper, the tradeoff between power consumption and transmission delay in the fog-cloud computing system is investigated. We formulate a workload allocation problem which suggests the optimal workload allocations between fog and cloud toward the minimal power consumption with the constrained service delay. The problem is then tackled using an approximate approach by decomposing the primal problem into three subproblems of corresponding subsystems, which can be, respectively, solved. Finally, based on simulations and numerical results, we show that by sacrificing modest computation resources to save communication bandwidth and reduce transmission latency, fog computing can significantly improve the performance of cloud computing.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks in Cloud Computing Environments: A Survey, Some Research Issues, and Challenges

Abstract: Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in cloud computing environments are growing due to the essential characteristics of cloud computing. With recent advances in software-defined networking (SDN), SDN-based cloud brings us new chances to defeat DDoS attacks in cloud computing environments. Nevertheless, there is a contradictory relationship between SDN and DDoS attacks. On one hand, the capabilities of SDN, including software-based traffic analysis, centralized control, global view of the network, dynamic updating of forwarding rules, make it easier to detect and react to DDoS attacks. On the other hand, the security of SDN itself remains to be addressed, and potential DDoS vulnerabilities exist across SDN platforms. In this paper, we discuss the new trends and characteristics of DDoS attacks in cloud computing, and provide a comprehensive survey of defense mechanisms against DDoS attacks using SDN. In addition, we review the studies about launching DDoS attacks on SDN, as well as the methods against DDoS attacks in SDN. To the best of our knowledge, the contradictory relationship between SDN and DDoS attacks has not been well addressed in previous works. This work can help to understand how to make full use of SDN's advantages to defeat DDoS attacks in cloud computing environments and how to prevent SDN itself from becoming a victim of DDoS attacks, which are important for the smooth evolution of SDN-based cloud without the distraction of DDoS attacks.

Fog Computing: A Taxonomy, Survey and Future Directions

Abstract: In recent years, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices/sensors has increased to a great extent. To support the computational demand of real-time latency-sensitive applications of largely geo-distributed IoT devices/sensors, a new computing paradigm named "Fog computing" has been introduced. Generally, Fog computing resides closer to the IoT devices/sensors and extends the Cloud-based computing, storage and networking facilities. In this chapter, we comprehensively analyse the challenges in Fogs acting as an intermediate layer between IoT devices/ sensors and Cloud datacentres and review the current developments in this field. We present a taxonomy of Fog computing according to the identified challenges and its key features.We also map the existing works to the taxonomy in order to identify current research gaps in the area of Fog computing. Moreover, based on the observations, we propose future directions for research.

Enabling Personalized Search over Encrypted Outsourced Data with Efficiency Improvement

Abstract: In cloud computing, searchable encryption scheme over outsourced data is a hot research field. However, most existing works on encrypted search over outsourced cloud data follow the model of “one size fits all” and ignore personalized search intention. Moreover, most of them support only exact keyword search, which greatly affects data usability and user experience. So how to design a searchable encryption scheme that supports personalized search and improves user search experience remains a very challenging task. In this paper, for the first time, we study and solve the problem of personalized multi-keyword ranked search over encrypted data (PRSE) while preserving privacy in cloud computing. With the help of semantic ontology WordNet, we build a user interest model for individual user by analyzing the user’s search history, and adopt a scoring mechanism to express user interest smartly. To address the limitations of the model of “one size fit all” and keyword exact search, we propose two PRSE schemes for different search intentions. Extensive experiments on real-world dataset validate our analysis and show that our proposed solution is very efficient and effective.

Fog-computing-based radio access networks: issues and challenges

Abstract: An F-RAN is presented in this article as a promising paradigm for the fifth generation wireless communication system to provide high spectral and energy efficiency. The core idea is to take full advantage of local radio signal processing, cooperative radio resource management, and distributed storing capabilities in edge devices, which can decrease the heavy burden on fronthaul and avoid large-scale radio signal processing in the centralized baseband unit pool. This article comprehensively presents the system architecture and key techniques of F-RANs. In particular, key techniques and their corresponding solutions, including transmission mode selection and interference suppression, are discussed. Open issues in terms of edge caching, software-defined networking, and network function virtualization are also identified.

EdgeIoT: Mobile Edge Computing for the Internet of Things

Abstract: In order to overcome the scalability problem of the traditional Internet of Things architecture (i.e., data streams generated from distributed IoT devices are transmitted to the remote cloud via the Internet for further analysis), this article proposes a novel approach to mobile edge computing for the IoT architecture, edgeIoT, to handle the data streams at the mobile edge. Specifically, each BS is connected to a fog node, which provides computing resources locally. On the top of the fog nodes, the SDN-based cellular core is designed to facilitate packet forwarding among fog nodes. Meanwhile, we propose a hierarchical fog computing architecture in each fog node to provide flexible IoT services while maintaining user privacy: each user's IoT devices are associated with a proxy VM (located in a fog node), which collects, classifies, and analyzes the devices' raw data streams, converts them into metadata, and transmits the metadata to the corresponding application VMs (which are owned by IoT service providers). Each application VM receives the corresponding metadata from different proxy VMs and provides its service to users. In addition, a novel proxy VM migration scheme is proposed to minimize the traffic in the SDNbased core.

Security Analysis of Emerging Smart Home Applications

Abstract: Recently, several competing smart home programming frameworks that support third party app development have emerged. These frameworks provide tangible benefits to users, but can also expose users to significant security risks. This paper presents the first in-depth empirical security analysis of one such emerging smart home programming platform. We analyzed Samsung-owned SmartThings, which has the largest number of apps among currently available smart home platforms, and supports a broad range of devices including motion sensors, fire alarms, and door locks. SmartThings hosts the application runtime on a proprietary, closed-source cloud backend, making scrutiny challenging. We overcame the challenge with a static source code analysis of 499 SmartThings apps (called SmartApps) and 132 device handlers, and carefully crafted test cases that revealed many undocumented features of the platform. Our key findings are twofold. First, although SmartThings implements a privilege separation model, we discovered two intrinsic design flaws that lead to significant overprivilege in SmartApps. Our analysis reveals that over 55% of SmartApps in the store are overprivileged due to the capabilities being too coarse-grained. Moreover, once installed, a SmartApp is granted full access to a device even if it specifies needing only limited access to the device. Second, the SmartThings event subsystem, which devices use to communicate asynchronously with SmartApps via events, does not sufficiently protect events that carry sensitive information such as lock codes. We exploited framework design flaws to construct four proof-of-concept attacks that: (1) secretly planted door lock codes, (2) stole existing door lock codes, (3) disabled vacation mode of the home, and (4) induced a fake fire alarm. We conclude the paper with security lessons for the design of emerging smart home programming frameworks.

A Privacy-Preserving and Copy-Deterrence Content-Based Image Retrieval Scheme in Cloud Computing

Abstract: With the increasing importance of images in people’s daily life, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been widely studied. Compared with text documents, images consume much more storage space. Hence, its maintenance is considered to be a typical example for cloud storage outsourcing. For privacy-preserving purposes, sensitive images, such as medical and personal images, need to be encrypted before outsourcing, which makes the CBIR technologies in plaintext domain to be unusable. In this paper, we propose a scheme that supports CBIR over encrypted images without leaking the sensitive information to the cloud server. First, feature vectors are extracted to represent the corresponding images. After that, the pre-filter tables are constructed by locality-sensitive hashing to increase search efficiency. Moreover, the feature vectors are protected by the secure kNN algorithm, and image pixels are encrypted by a standard stream cipher. In addition, considering the case that the authorized query users may illegally copy and distribute the retrieved images to someone unauthorized, we propose a watermark-based protocol to deter such illegal distributions. In our watermark-based protocol, a unique watermark is directly embedded into the encrypted images by the cloud server before images are sent to the query user. Hence, when image copy is found, the unlawful query user who distributed the image can be traced by the watermark extraction. The security analysis and the experiments show the security and efficiency of the proposed scheme.

Big data driven smart energy management: From big data to big insights

Abstract: Large amounts of data are increasingly accumulated in the energy sector with the continuous application of sensors, wireless transmission, network communication, and cloud computing technologies. To fulfill the potential of energy big data and obtain insights to achieve smart energy management, we present a comprehensive study of big data driven smart energy management. We first discuss the sources and characteristics of energy big data. Also, a process model of big data driven smart energy management is proposed. Then taking smart grid as the research background, we provide a systematic review of big data analytics for smart energy management. It is discussed from four major aspects, namely power generation side management, microgrid and renewable energy management, asset management and collaborative operation, as well as demand side management (DSM). Afterwards, the industrial development of big data-driven smart energy management is analyzed and discussed. Finally, we point out the challenges of big data-driven smart energy management in IT infrastructure, data collection and governance, data integration and sharing, processing and analysis, security and privacy, and professionals.

Software-Defined Industrial Internet of Things in the Context of Industry 4.0

Abstract: In recent years, there have been great advances in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and its related domains, such as industrial wireless networks (IWNs), big data, and cloud computing These emerging technologies will bring great opportunities for promoting industrial upgrades and even allow the introduction of the fourth industrial revolution, namely, Industry 40 In the context of Industry 40, all kinds of intelligent equipment (eg, industrial robots) supported by wired or wireless networks are widely adopted, and both real-time and delayed signals coexist Therefore, based on the advancement of software-defined networks technology, we propose a new concept for industrial environments by introducing software-defined IIoT in order to make the network more flexible In this paper, we analyze the IIoT architecture, including physical layer, IWNs, industrial cloud, and smart terminals, and describe the information interaction among different devices Then, we propose a software-defined IIoT architecture to manage physical devices and provide an interface for information exchange Subsequently, we discuss the prominent problems and possible solutions for software-defined IIoT Finally, we select an intelligent manufacturing environment as an assessment test bed, and implement the basic experimental analysis This paper will open a new research direction of IIoT and accelerate the implementation of Industry 40

Blockchain Platform for Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) are being adopted for industrial and manufacturing applications such as manufacturing automation, remote machine diagnostics, prognostic health management of industrial machines and supply chain management Cloud-Based Manufacturing is a recent on-demand model of manufacturing that is leveraging IoT technologies While Cloud-Based Manufacturing enables on-demand access to manufacturing resources, a trusted intermediary is required for transactions between the users who wish to avail manufacturing services We present a decentralized, peer-to-peer platform called BPIIoT for Industrial Internet of Things based on the Block chain technology With the use of Blockchain technology, the BPIIoT platform enables peers in a decentralized, trustless, peer-to-peer network to interact with each other without the need for a trusted intermediary

A cloud-scale acceleration architecture

Abstract: Hyperscale datacenter providers have struggled to balance the growing need for specialized hardware (efficiency) with the economic benefits of homogeneity (manageability) In this paper we propose a new cloud architecture that uses reconfigurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications This Configurable Cloud architecture places a layer of reconfigurable logic (FPGAs) between the network switches and the servers, enabling network flows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers We deployed this design over a production server bed, and show how it can be used for both service acceleration (Web search ranking) and network acceleration (encryption of data in transit at high-speeds) This architecture is much more scalable than prior work which used secondary rack-scale networks for inter-FPGA communication By coupling to the network plane, direct FPGA-to-FPGA messages can be achieved at comparable latency to previous work, without the secondary network Additionally, the scale of direct inter-FPGA messaging is much larger The average round-trip latencies observed in our measurements among 24, 1000, and 250,000 machines are under 3, 9, and 20 microseconds, respectively The Configurable Cloud architecture has been deployed at hyperscale in Microsoft's production datacenters worldwide

The New Frontier in RAN Heterogeneity: Multi-Tier Drone-Cells

Abstract: In cellular networks, the locations of the RAN elements are determined mainly based on the long-term traffic behavior. However, when the random and hard-to-predict spatio-temporal distribution of the traffic (load, demand) does not fully match the fixed locations of the RAN elements (supply), some performance degradation becomes inevitable. The concept of multi-tier cells (heterogeneous networks, HetNets) has been introduced in 4G networks to alleviate this mismatch. However, as the traffic distribution deviates more and more from the long-term average, even the HetNet architecture will have difficulty in coping with the erratic supply-demand mismatch, unless the RAN is grossly over-engineered (which is a financially non-viable solution). In this article, we study the opportunistic utilization of low-altitude unmanned aerial platforms equipped with BSs (i.e., drone-BSs) in future wireless networks. In particular, we envisage a multi-tier drone-cell network complementing the terrestrial HetNets. The variety of equipment and non-rigid placement options allow utilizing multi-tier drone-cell networks to serve diversified demands. Hence, drone-cells bring the supply to where the demand is, which sets new frontiers for the heterogeneity in 5G networks. We investigate the advancements promised by dronecells and discuss the challenges associated with their operation and management. We propose a drone-cell management framework (DMF) benefiting from the synergy among SDN, network functions virtualization, and cloud computing. We demonstrate DMF mechanisms via a case study, and numerically show that it can reduce the cost of utilizing drone-cells in multi-tenancy cellular networks.

Securing Smart Cities Using Blockchain Technology

Abstract: A smart city uses information technology to integrate and manage physical, social, and business infrastructures in order to provide better services to its dwellers while ensuring efficient and optimal utilization of available resources. With the proliferation of technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and interconnected networks, smart cities can deliver innovative solutions and more direct interaction and collaboration between citizens and the local government. Despite a number of potential benefits, digital disruption poses many challenges related to information security and privacy. This paper proposes a security framework that integrates the blockchain technology with smart devices to provide a secure communication platform in a smart city.