Security and Forensics Challenges to The MK Smart Project

Abstract

MK Smart project is a joint initiative which is led by the Open university and supported by Key players such as University of Bedfordshire (Milton Keynes Campus), University of Cambridge, British Telecom (BT), Milton Keynes Council, E. ON, Anglian Water, HR Wallingford Ltd, Satellite Applications Catapult, Community Action MK, Fronesys, Graymatter and Playground Energy. The project is partly funded by HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) and led by The Open University with the primarily aim of developing innovative solutions to support the economic growth in Milton Keynes [MK Smart]. MK Data Hub is the central infrastructure to the project which supports the acquisition and management of the big data from various data sources relevant to the city systems. [MK Smart, 2014]. Whilst the data plays crucial part to this project, its forensic value of the data held is also important to the investigation of this project. Data might be required to help in any forensic investigation to be proven in a case of Data integrity. The challenges of security and forensics to this project may be hinderance to its future. Mitigating these challenges can go a long way not only to this project but to other smart cities projects. This paper concentrates on realising the security and forensics challenges of the MK Smart project, primarily looking at the challenges of securing such a huge data on a datahub and concentrating on the best possible way to forensically investigate the large complex data such as the data stored on the Datahub.