الفهرس 
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Abstract
In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become one of the most essential technologies driving the development of smart cities worldwide. As a result, many researchers have developed various security strategies and policies. However, these policies have not addressed how to reduce the other challenges of access control, such as identity verification, authorization misuse, and privacy leakage.
The purpose of this study is to propose a framework named Internet of Things Access Control over Blockchain (IoT-AC/Bc) to secure smart cities. The study describes a new method integrating Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) models based on IoT and Blockchain technologies. This method enables fast access authentication on smart city gates by using ZKP, which provides an extra layer of security to address other access control challenges.
The framework consists of two smart contracts: (IoT-AC/BC) smart contract and (Blockchain Ledger Management) smart contract. The IoT-AC/BC smart contract contains the core framework’s functions for managing authentication requests, users’ access sessions’ identities, and assets’ realtime interactions. The Blockchain ledger management smart contract provides functions to implement distributed access control and track the history of different activities based on the Blockchain network’s ledger.
The framework achieves availability, scalability, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and decentralization, strengthening distributism, role authority, access rights, and concurrent identity access requests.
The results are demonstrated through a comparative analysis focused on the number of multithreaded requests, the cost of smart contract deployment, the MFA performance for users’ interactions with the smart city gates, and the security strength levels. Moreover, the framework’s performance effectiveness is evaluated through a case study comprising many scenarios for various user requests. The framework improves security by 94% under low and medium attack strength and 89% under high attack strength. These percentages were achieved after conducting 18 security attacks.
This study is considered novel because the framework utilizes ZKP over the Blockchain network as an extra cryptographic technique with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) as a logical access control model to achieve fast accessibility authorization for users’ transactions while preserving their private identity on smart city gates.