A blockchain-assisted security management framework for collaborative intrusion detection in smart cities

Aiming to safeguard a decentralized setup such as smart cities, collaborative intrusion detection system (CIDS) has become a mainstream security mechanism to protect different types of computer networks, especially decentralized computing platforms such as Internet of Things (IoT). The main benefit of CIDS relies on the information sharing process among devices, nodes, software and hardware entities. However, traditional CIDS often requires a trusted third partner, e.g., a centralized computing server, to help build up a trusted communication channel among various entities. Such requirement is not practical in real-world implementation, making the integrity of shared information compromised easily. With the wide adoption, blockchain technology has given a solution to protect the distributed/collaborative detection system. In the current market, blockchain technology has been extensively researched across many detection scenarios, but there is a need to explore how such technology can overall contribute to CIDS and a general distributed detection system. In this work, we introduce a blockchain-assisted security management framework for CIDS, which summarizes and provides an integrated protection given by blockchain. In the case study, we evaluate our proposed framework in both a simulated and a real CIDS setup with challenge-based mechanism. The results demonstrate the promising benefits provided by blockchain in CIDS.