An overview of security and privacy in smart cities' IoT communications

TLDR

Smart cities enhance quality of life by enabling real‑time control of physical objects for services such as transport, healthcare, and smart buildings, yet they collect sensitive data and face security and privacy challenges across architectural layers, making awareness essential. This paper aims to highlight the main smart‑city applications and to identify the major privacy and security issues inherent in their architecture. It reviews current solutions for securing information‑centric smart‑city applications and outlines future research challenges to improve performance. The review reveals existing security and privacy measures while pinpointing gaps that require further research to enhance system performance.

Abstract

Abstract Smart cities have brought significant improvements in quality of life and services to citizens and urban environments. They are fully enabled to control the physical objects in real time and provide intelligent information to citizens in terms of transport, healthcare, smart buildings, public safety, smart parking, and traffic system and smart agriculture, and so on. The applications of smart cities are able to collect sensitive information. However, various security and privacy issues may arise at different levels of the architecture. Therefore, it is important to be aware of these security and privacy issues while designing and implementing the applications. This paper highlights main applications of smart cities and addresses the major privacy and security issues in the architecture of the smart cities' applications. It also reviews some of the current solutions regarding the security and privacy of information‐centric smart cities' applications and presents future research challenges that still need to be considered for performance improvement.