A Blockchain-Based Network Framework for Privacy Preservation in Smart Cities

Smart cities (SCs) use the Internet of Things (IoT) to collect and process data to communicate with their infrastructure and assets in real time. A great deal of techniques, such as encryption protocols, Random Forest-based AI-driven threat detection, and blockchain architectures, have been developed to address cybersecurity challenges in smart cities (SCs). These techniques, however, have limitations such as their scalability, high computational expenses, and energy inefficiency. Therefore, in this study, to overcome these challenges, we propose a blockchain-based infrastructure called BlockSafeNet. This uses artificial intelligence, big data, and blockchain to enhance cybersecurity in SCs. The effectiveness of the proposed BlockSafeNet framework was evaluated using responsiveness, computational time, encryption quality score, detection rate, false positive rate, latency, throughput, and energy consumption as the primary cybersecurity performance metrics. These metrics were selected to assess communication efficiency, threat detection capability, privacy preservation, scalability, and overall security performance within smart-city IoT environments. To ensure secure data transactions, robust threat detection, and efficient communication. The system’s high calculation speed and detection rate show potential for managing sensitive maternal health data collected by IoT devices. The platform also shows how IoT may be used by healthcare services to monitor public health in real time, allowing hospitals, emergency services, and public health agencies to securely share data. This aids in resource optimization, improving service delivery, and preserving data privacy and trust in SCs. Data was obtained from the UCI Machine Learning Repository on Kaggle to validate the developed framework. By evaluating the effectiveness of BlockSafeNet in tackling cybersecurity challenges, we establish its practical relevance and usability in SCs. The proposed BlockSafeNet framework achieved a responsiveness of 24 s, an encryption quality score of 0.89, computational time of 85 s, and a detection rate of 91%, demonstrating significant improvements in secure IoT communication, privacy preservation, and AI-driven cyber threat detection within smart city infrastructures. shows that SC IoT security has significantly improved through the adoption of new data protection methods and better measures of security, providing a positive impact on the SC ecosystem.