Cybersecurity Challenges Of IoT-enabled Smart Cities: A Survey

The new era of the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing our urban lives in every way. With the support of recent IoT technologies, IoT-enabled smart cities are capable of building extensive data networks incorporating a large number of heterogeneous devices participating in the data collection and decision-making process. This massive data backbone formed by IoT devices allows systems to perform real-time environmental monitoring and actuating. Coupled with high flexibility and ease of deployment, IoT-based solutions can be easily adopted for different application scenarios. However, there are many challenges that system designers would need to consider before employing large-scale IoT deployment. Our current infrastructure will have to quickly adapt to handle the big data in our systems, supply interoperability for cross-functional performance, and provide the cognitive capabilities for system intelligence. Most importantly, we must consider a new spectrum of security challenges arising from the new context. In this paper, we aim to provide general security guidelines for IoT-enabled smart city developments by 1) presenting some of the latest innovations in IoT-enabled smart cities, and highlighting common security challenges and research opportunities; 2) reviewing recent cryptographic security implementations for IoT-enabled smart cities; 3) using the Activity-Network-Things architecture to analyze major security challenges in IoT deployments and proposing a set of specialized security requirements for IoT-enabled smart cities; 4) providing a discussion on the potential prospect for IoT and IoT security.