STRENGTHENING DIGITAL LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT THROUGH SECURE IOT INFRASTRUCTURE: A LIGHTWEIGHT COAP-BASED AUTHENTICATION FRAMEWORK FOR MUNICIPAL SERVICES

Abstract

Local government and sub-national authorities increasingly rely on Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures to support smart municipal services such as traffic management, waste collection, public lighting and environmental monitoring. The reliability and security of these digital infrastructure are critical for effective local self-government, public service continuity and citizen trust. However, most municipal IoT deployments operate under strict resource constraints, making conventional security mechanisms impractical. This paper proposes a lightweight and secure mutual authentication framework designed for resource-constrained IoT devices used in local government and municipal service environments. By leveraging symmetric cryptographic primitives and the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), the proposed approach enables secure device authentication without relying on computationally expensive DTLS handshakes. A state-based authentication mechanism is introduced to enhance resistance against replay, impersonation and denial of service attacks. Security analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves strong protection against common attack vectors while maintaining low communication, storage and computational overhead. From a local self-government perspective, the proposed approach provides a practical security foundation for scalable and cost-effective deployment of IoT-based municipal services, supporting digital transformation at the sub-national level.