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Smart city projects stand out for including a wide array of communication systems and heterogeneous technologies operated by multiple entities that collect data from citizens in very different ways. Basically, these projects involve three main actors that may have conflicting interests regarding the ownership and exploitation of the generated data: public administrations, service providers and citizens. Nevertheless, this is not a new problem. Actually, the most popular communication systems on the Internet, such as social networks, often have issues of this kind that can become highly visible in the press, especially when service providers, who commonly store data generated by their users via centralized models, have a security issue leading to a massive data leak, or when providers take advantage of their dominant position to exploit data improperly or sell it to third parties. This paper proposes an architecture to create user-centric data management applications for communications in smart cities where data is stored and managed in a decentralized way to reduce dependency on service providers and return control of the data to the different actors involved in the communications. In this paper, a proof of concept of the proposed architecture is implemented, using Ethereum and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) as the main tools, to demonstrate its feasibility, show concrete protocols, and discuss the proposal on an empirical basis. • An architecture for decentralized data management apps focused on smart city needs. • The proposal minimizes common risks regarding data storage and management. • A proof-of-concept demonstrates the feasibility of the proposal on an empirical basis. • The proof-of-concept is implemented using Ethereum and IPFS as key tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, the vast majority of Internet services used to distribute hypermedia content follow a centralized model, which is highly dependent on servers and raises several quality and security concerns. Among other issues, this centralized model creates single points of failure, requires trust on providers to avoid censorship and personal data misuse, and results in a scenario where digital content tends to disappear or be inaccessible over time, for example, when a content creator stops maintaining a site or when the content is moved to another location. To improve this, it is necessary to replicate data and follow more distributed models. Nevertheless, current platforms to distribute content in this way, either do not offer an effective mechanism to maintain the privacy of their users or they offer full-anonymity, which contributes to the dissemination of content that goes beyond the law and moral standards of many users. This paper proposes a novel distributed architecture that enables hypermedia resource distribution ensuring censorship resistance and conditional k-anonymity. In the proposed system, users form groups to share hypermedia content where the anonymity of the publisher is preserved only if the publication follows a set of rules defined by the group. To this end, the proposed system uses threshold discernible ring signatures to enable conditional k-anonymity, the Ethereum blockchain platform to manage groups and user identities, and the InterPlanetary File System to store and share hypermedia resources in a distributed way. This document provides the design for the proposed architecture and protocols, it evaluates system risks and its security properties, and it discusses the proposal in general terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]