Securing high-velocity data: Authentication and key management model for smart city communication

The smart city is established through continuous analytics of the city data that is harvested from various smart systems and IoT sensors deployed in the city such as, smart homes, buildings, and parking, smart pollution monitoring, transportation sensors, etc., which generates continuous streams of high-speed data. Lack of security and privacy in the smart city system while communicating with the central analysis building gives the control of the city to the cyber criminals. However, offering privacy and security for such a continuous high-speed communication requires an efficient security model without introducing any delay in the real-time communication of the smart city. Thus, to cater with these challenges, in this paper, we proposed an efficient authentication and key management model among the smart city entities such as, remote smart systems (RSS) (i.e., smart homes, smart parkings, smart health systems, environment control system, etc.), remote users (U), and central city analysis building. First, every remote system and citizen have to be registered with the system through secure registration phase. Later, the session keys are generated and shared among the smart city entities that are used in secure routine communication. Moreover, the protocol is enabled with an efficient secure communication mechanism with the ability of parallel processing that makes it possible to work in a real-time environment. Finally, the security of the proposed model is verified informally through mathematical analysis and formally by implementing it using AVISPA tool (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications). Also, the proposed protocol is evaluated in terms of its efficiency and capability to work in a real-time environment. The results show that the protocol is secure against known cyber-attacks, is efficient, and faster than the existing schemes.