Cyber security challenges in Smart Cities: Safety, security and privacy

Abstract

The world is experiencing an evolution of Smart Cities. These emerge from innovations in information technology that, while they create new economic and social opportunities, pose challenges to our security and expectations of privacy. Humans are already interconnected via smart phones and gadgets. Smart energy meters, security devices and smart appliances are being used in many cities. Homes, cars, public venues and other social systems are now on their path to the full connectivity known as the "Internet of Things." Standards are evolving for all of these potentially connected systems. They will lead to unprecedented improvements in the quality of life. To benefit from them, city infrastructures and services are changing with new interconnected systems for monitoring, control and automation. Intelligent transportation, public and private, will access a web of interconnected data from GPS location to weather and traffic updates. Integrated systems will aid public safety, emergency responders and in disaster recovery. We examine two important and entangled challenges: security and privacy. Security includes illegal access to information and attacks causing physical disruptions in service availability. As digital citizens are more and more instrumented with data available about their location and activities, privacy seems to disappear. Privacy protecting systems that gather data and trigger emergency response when needed are technological challenges that go hand-in-hand with the continuous security challenges. Their implementation is essential for a Smart City in which we would wish to live. We also present a model representing the interactions between person, servers and things. Those are the major element in the Smart City and their interactions are what we need to protect.