Security Challenges and Mitigation Approaches for Smart Cities

Abstract

A city that has developmental activities along with technologies to optimize operations and services in urban places where it connects to all citizens is known as a smart city. Smart cities are erected with the help of sensor devices and network communications through many access points to control data transmission. Devices that can transmit data via certain network protocols without interruption of human to human, or human to computer, are called Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Smart cities are controlled with the help of IoT devices and data transmission through communication medium. In each transaction, devices are transmitting much data in the form of bits. Collectively the shared data used to send and receive are millions of bits to process certain tasks from targeted devices. Transferred bits are all some types of commands, instructions, or input and output values from or to devices from a centralized server. The usage of millions of information for instructions, input data, and output leads to using big data. Security and privacy are mandated for smart city concerns. Due to data flow in between centralized access devices and IoT devices, attackers can misuse the medium of data transmission to hack devices. Assimilating thousands of interconnected devices and systems from various cities for its greater and critical infrastructure, government officials link system data in a common database. Linking into the common modules gives an option to hackers to find a loophole or backdoor to enter into the network to hack the device’s functionalities. The leakages and breaches of data must be monitored between end devices. Security challenges for any data fall on its reliability, confidentiality and authenticity. Security counter measures of data transactions over communication channels are imperative to shun an attack. The government has to incorporate some security features along with IoT devices for the betterment of functional reliability. IoT, big data, security challenges, and behavioral improvements on smart city developments are to be discussed in this chapter.