✅ Finalized
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The pilot used IoT devices in Parque de las Llamas to collect environmental data, including temperature, humidity, CO₂, volatile organic compounds, and noise, alongside estimated visitor counts. The team placed five environmental sensors across the playground area and along a section extending from the University of Cantabria towards the residential zones. A people-counter device below the park restaurant detected Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MAC addresses. The system sent the data to three destinations. Eclipse sensiNact supported visualisation and analysis. The Crypto Companion Database encrypted the data with an asymmetric key pair, allowing only the owner and authorised operators to access it, and recorded a hash on the Quorum blockchain to protect its integrity. The marketplace made the data available for purchase because it contained no personal data, with buyers paying in M-Sec Tokens, a blockchain-based cryptocurrency. Nine QR codes around the park allowed visitors to open a web app, view their location and decrypted sensor readings, and rate their satisfaction on a five-star scale.
The pilot aimed to test secure collection and monetisation of public-space IoT data. By extending sensing into Las Llamas, the project sought to complement the smart city’s existing information and help the municipality draw useful conclusions from different areas of the park. The team also aimed to strengthen security through both hardware and software measures, protect citizens’ privacy, and safeguard the data against attacks.
Ayuntamiento de Santander (Santander City Council) — UTA member city · Municipal authority, smart city operations · Cantabria, Spain
Santander City Council participated as an M-Sec consortium partner and hosted the pilot. The council owns the park and represents the intended beneficiary of the observations generated through the deployment.
Tecnologías, Servicios Telemáticos y Sistemas (TST) — IoT hardware and systems · Spain
TST participated as an M-Sec partner and served as the technical lead named for this use case. The company supplied the IoT device engineering behind the environmental sensors and people counter. See the correction note below regarding the innovator list in the register row.
Worldline (Worldline Iberia SA) — M-Sec coordinator · Payments and digital services, IoT platforms · Spain
Worldline coordinated the M-Sec project and contributed to the marketplace, tokenisation, and Crypto Companion Database strands used in this use case.
CEA (Commissariat à l’Énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives) — centre de recherche · France
CEA participated as an M-Sec partner and originated Eclipse sensiNact, the open-source IoT platform that received park data over MQTT. The Eclipse Foundation now hosts sensiNact, while Kentyou, a 2020 CEA spin-off and UTA member company, commercialises the platform. Kentyou’s founding team also coordinated the EU–Japan ClouT and BigClouT projects.
Note on the wider consortium: M-Sec also included ICCS (Greece), F6S Network (UK), and, in Japan, NTT East, Keio University, Yokohama National University, the National Institute of Informatics, Waseda University, and NTT DATA Institute of Management Consulting. NTT East and Keio University are UTA members. M-Sec’s Japanese pilot city, Fujisawa, is also a UTA member city and the subject of NV 24. The project paired Santander and Fujisawa throughout the programme, and both cities also participated in ClouT and BigClouT.
Santander is the capital of Cantabria on Spain’s northern Atlantic coast. With about 170,000 residents, it ranks among Europe’s longest-running smart city testbeds. The Smart Santander large-scale IoT experimental facility has operated in the city since 2010, and Santander has hosted several EU research projects, including ClouT and M-Sec. Santander is also a UTA member city.
Parque Atlántico de las Llamas covers 11 hectares of reclaimed marshland between the Sports Palace and the La Albericia neighbourhood. The park opened in 2007 and now serves as a botanical garden for Atlantic flora, with more than 2,000 trees, a 45,000 m² reed-bed wetland, a 2.5 km cycle lane, playgrounds, sports areas, and an open-air amphitheatre. More than 75 bird species visit the park each year. The city considers the park one of its lungs, which made it a natural choice for the pilot. Environmental readings from the park also offer greater value for residents’ well-being than data from a traffic junction.
M-Sec developed this deployment as Use Case 1. The project team installed environmental and visitor-counting IoT devices in the park. It processed the data through a complete security chain that combined encryption, blockchain tamper-proofing, and a tokenised marketplace. The team tested whether public-space sensing could remain secure, protect privacy, and support commercial data trading at the same time.
Santander already operated one of Europe’s densest municipal sensor networks. However, the city lacked a way to extend this sensing into a public park while maintaining strong security guarantees, and it lacked a mechanism for making the resulting data available to interested users.
The park provided a strong test case for several reasons. Residents could use information about air quality, CO₂, volatile organic compounds, noise, and visitor levels when deciding whether to visit, particularly with their children. This gave the data a clear audience. At the same time, the open and unsupervised environment left the devices physically exposed, making security a practical concern. Visitor counting also required the system to detect people’s presence, placing privacy at the centre of the design.
M-Sec — Multi-layered Security technologies for hyper-connected smart cities using Blockchain, Big Data, Cloud, and IoT — addressed these challenges as an EU–Japan project. The European Commission funded the project under Horizon 2020 together with Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. Twelve partners from Spain, France, Greece, the UK, and Japan participated in the project, which ran from 1 July 2018 to 30 September 2021. The consortium tested the architecture in two pilot cities, Santander and Fujisawa, with Use Case 1 focusing on Santander’s parks.
The project team built security into the architecture from the start rather than adding it later. The system created a chain from the device to the buyer: hardware-level protection secured the devices, encryption at rest protected the data with keys held by the data owner, an on-chain has enabled the system to detect subsequent changes, and the marketplace handled only data without personal content. The team also designed the framework to support further deployments in Santander, nearby villages, and mid-sized cities such as Gijón and León.
The pilot addressed four connected challenges in public-space sensing.
First, Santander faced an information gap in public green spaces. The city’s existing smart city data did not extend into the park, leaving the municipality without a basis for observing conditions across different areas and residents without a source of local environmental information for a place where they spend their leisure time.
Second, open public spaces exposed devices to both physical and digital threats. Someone could tamper with sensors in an unsupervised park or alter their measurements. The pilot therefore combined hardware and software security to protect readings against attacks.
Third, citizen privacy presented a key challenge when sensors counted people. The system needed to detect individual presence to estimate visitor numbers, so the project treated privacy as a core design requirement rather than simply a compliance issue.
Fourth, Santander lacked a mechanism for creating value from the data. Researchers, businesses, and other public bodies could benefit from environmental information, but the municipality had no system for offering that data with guarantees of origin and integrity.
Tool — IoT devices in public space
The team installed five environmental sensors across the playground area and along a longitudinal section of the park running from the University of Cantabria towards the residential zones. The sensors measured temperature, humidity, CO₂, volatile organic compounds, and noise. The team also installed a people-counter below the park restaurant, which estimated visitor numbers by detecting Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MAC addresses.
Tool — IoT data platform and visualisation
Eclipse sensiNact received device data over an MQTT connection. Users could visualise devices and data through the platform and run their own analyses. CEA originally developed sensiNact as an open-source IoT platform; the Eclipse Foundation now hosts the project, while Kentyou, a CEA spin-off and UTA member company, commercialises it.
Tool — encrypted storage with ownership-based access
The Crypto Companion Database encrypted data with an asymmetric public/private key pair. After authentication, the owner could access the data, as could any operators the owner authorised. This approach made access control a property of the storage layer rather than of the application operating on top of it.
Tool — on-chain integrity anchoring
The system generated a hash from the encrypted data and stored it on the Quorum blockchain. Because the on-chain record could not be erased or altered, the system could detect subsequent changes to the stored data: any modified dataset would produce a different hash.
Tool — blockchain data marketplace
The marketplace made the data available for purchase because it contained no personal data about end users. Stakeholders interested in environmental and visitor-count data could purchase it using M-Sec Tokens, a cryptocurrency implemented through a smart contract on a blockchain.
Tool — public access layer
The team placed nine QR codes at key locations around the park. Visitors could scan them to open a web app showing information about their location and decrypted IoT measurements. Users registered on the platform to access the data and could rate their satisfaction on a five-star scale. Regular park visitors interacted with the pilot primarily through this interface.
Completed
The pilot demonstrated that a full end-to-end data marketplace can operate in a real public space. Sensors in Las Llamas Park generated data, and the marketplace made that data available for purchase by interested stakeholders. The key achievement went beyond making the sensing infrastructure work: the project team connected the entire chain, from devices in the park through encryption and on-chain integrity protection to tokenised data sales, and operated it end to end.
The deployment also demonstrated that the security architecture could operate in an open environment. Data travelled from park sensors through Eclipse sensiNact, the Crypto Companion Database, and Quorum to the marketplace. The deployment showed that access control, encryption at rest, and blockchain tamper protection could work together without interrupting the data flow.
Citizen engagement provided another positive result. End users responded well to the QR-code interface, particularly families visiting the park. The interface turned the sensing infrastructure into something residents could interact with rather than background technology that remained invisible to them.
Finally, the pilot established a path towards scaling the M-Sec framework. The project identified opportunities to deploy the framework more widely across Santander, in nearby villages, and in mid-sized cities such as Gijón and León.
The pilot highlighted concerns about the reliability and accuracy of measurements from the low-cost sensors used in the prototype. These sensors are less reliable than the high-end equipment meteorological services use and that citizens generally trust. The project therefore identified calibration and error-compensation methods as priorities for future work.
The distinction matters: the marketplace can guarantee that no one has changed the data since collection, but it cannot guarantee the accuracy of the original measurements. Blockchain tamper-proofing protects the data’s integrity and provenance, but it cannot verify the truth of the measurements themselves. Buyers of park air-quality readings can use cryptographic evidence to confirm that the data has remained unchanged. Still, they cannot use it to confirm that the sensors were properly calibrated. For a pilot focused on monetisation, the team identified closing this gap as the most important remaining challenge.
The project concluded that the team would need to turn the prototypes into industrial products to keep the pilot running and ensure reliable data. Research-grade hardware alone cannot support a data product that customers would repeatedly pay for.
Users responded most positively to the QR-code experience, particularly families. The interface required little investment while generating much of the pilot’s positive user response.
