We’re happy to announce that our paper “Accessing Smart City Services in Untrustworthy Environments via Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Overlay Networks” has been published in the proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE)". Within this paper, we presented how our approach can be used to provide the foundations for a network of Smart City Services.

Abstract

For managing sensor-based data and services in advanced smart city environments, citizen participation in open private and public network environments plays an increasingly important role. Various approaches allow citizens to share, e.g., local sensors, urban data, and services to increase environmental awareness. Although privacy and (data and service) sovereignty are essential in citizen participation, most of these approaches rely on centralized trusted third parties or are unsuitable to be operated in untrustworthy (e.g., public) network environments. This paper presents drasyl, a fully decentralized transport overlay network that accommodates related trust and reliability issues. Consequently, drasyl allows citizens to access services and applications in public untrustworthy IP-based networks without needing a central trusted third-party service. drasyl provides a means to strengthen citizens’ privacy through end-to-end encrypted communication and methods to hide communication and service access between citizens from unauthorized third parties. Finally, the paper demonstrates how drasyl can be used as a basis for a peer-to-peer middleware that helps develop distributed applications.

The paper can be accessed through IEEE Xplore: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9564361

DOI: 10.1109/SOSE52839.2021.00021

Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash