Security and Privacy in your Smart City

With the majority of the population living in urban environments today, the concept of Smart Cities has become an urgent necessity. It refers to an urban transformation which, using latest ICT technologies, makes cities more efficient. Composed of a growing Internet of networks, such as the one connecting humans via cellular systems, computers via broadband connections, or objects and sensors via low-cost data links, the greatest challenge today is to meaningfully manage such systems. Given that these systems will greatly impact human lives, issues related to privacy and security have come into limelight. With a surge in security breaches, not only in the Internet but also with mobile phones and now sensing infrastructures, engineers are very conscious to include privacy and security requirements into architectural designs from the very beginning. This paper summarizes the key challenges, emerging technology standards, and issues to be watched out for in the context of privacy and security in smart cities. A key observations is that privacy can be achieved i) by imposing high security requirements onto the used technology to avoid third party abuses; and ii) by decoupling technical smart city data streams from the personal one to avoid abuse of data by insiders.