A Novel NFT Solution for Assets Digitization and Authentication in Cyber-Physical Systems: Blueprint and Evaluation

The blueprint of the proposed Decentralized Smart City of Things (DSCoT) has been presented with smart contracts development and deployment for robust security of resources in the context of cyber-physical systems (CPS) for smart cities. Since non-fungibility provided by the ERC721 standard for the cyber-physical systems (CPSs) components such as the admin, user, and IoT-enabled smart device/s in literature is explicitly missing, the proposed DSCoT devised the functionality of identification and authentication of the assets. The proposed identification and authentication mechanism in cyber-physical systems (CPSs) employs smart contracts to generate an authentication access code based on extended non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are used to authorize access to the corresponding assets. The evaluation and development of the extended NFT protocol for cyber-physical systems have been presented with the public and private blockchain deployments for evaluation comparison. The comparison demonstrated up to 96.69% promising results in terms of execution cost, efficiency, and time complexity compared to other proposed NFT-based solutions.