It is necessary to identify the main requirements in a smart city in the context of information security, in order to develop a better understanding of the problem areas. Moreover, the knowledge of core requirements will also help to identify the correct and feasible solutions to those problems. The information security in smart city is mostly dependent on three factors: governance, socioeconomic, and tech-nological factors. The main responsibility of these factors is to influence and identify the information security issues in a smart city. The ICT technologies play an important role and work together to form a smart city. They not only implement the whole infrastructure of a smart city and provide solutions to information security problems but also trigger new concerns and problems regarding security, privacy, protection, and resilience.
It is recognized that the governance factors and socioeconomic factors are dependent on the technological factors as they are implemented in smart city via technology. These factors come together to influence the information security issues in a smart city, which can again be managed through technology as it is a major driving force in this scenario. So the function of technology in security management and the issues of information security in implementation of all the technology require the primary concern. However, we cannot ignore other two factors along with technology factor as in order to identify the core information security requirements, there is need to study the governance, social, and economic factors as well. In this section, these factors are discussed in terms of information security.
2.6.1 Governance Factors
Various governance factors that influence and trigger the security issues include utility, health sector, infrastructure, education, transport, etc. The biggest concern for the researchers is attacks and frauds which can be introduced by improper implementation of the smart city while smart city promises to provide all the ways to maintain whole infrastructure and management issues. These malicious attacks and frauds can be problematic to the main purpose of smart cities. In fact, they could cause more issues than advantages they promise.
Need for Security Testing
An important aspect is brought into picture by Cesar Cerrudo, the Chief Technology Officer at the security research firm IOActive Labs [67]: the gover-nance authorities that are the customers of technologyfirms do not bother to test the security of the systems they buy. Their emphasis appears to be on testing the functionality of the technology, and they do not pay attention to the security testing.
So the awareness among the authorities to have a genuine concern over security issues is a key requirement.
Threats to Critical Infrastructures
Another of the most essential and vital areas is critical infrastructure where changing a solitary procedure in a basic framework can cause defer or loss of basic services [68]. The main critical infrastructures include health care, industry, and telecommunication. The implementation of critical infrastructures in smart cities mainly includes IoT and smart grids. So the possible threats to these two tech-nologies should be taken into consideration.
Moreover, big data integrity and resilience generated by critical systems are two factors that can pose big problems as big data needs to be properly stored, managed, and protected. This has also become the responsibility of a smart city’s critical infrastructure to handle and maintain its security, resilience, and data integrity [69].
Therefore, there is urgency for the critical infrastructure to be safe from malicious attacks that may cause crucial damage to smart cities and their promised services.
The most important type of critical infrastructure is health sector as it is also related to the life of patient which can be on a risk if critical information is altered by attacker [70]. Thus, there is a need for very secure encryption system for health information systems in a smart city.
Smart Mobility, Security, and Privacy Requirements
Privacy concerns also arise due to smart mobility as chances of personal infor-mation disclosure are possible in various phases such as collecting, publishing, and utilizing trace data. Here, localization techniques include GPS, GSM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and RFID because central servers do not need to know device IDs [71].
Trace analysis and data mining techniques are used by some of the smartphone apps that provide services of smart mobility. Moreover, the information sent and
received from devices used in smart mobility infrastructure may subject to mali-cious attacks cause wrong traffic reports in satellite navigation systems [72]. Hence, the importance of optimized use of ICT technology keeping in mind the security and privacy threats is identified by analyzing the problems in smart mobility domain.
Energy and Utility Optimization
Energy and utility services are more and more dependent on smart grids that make use of communication technologies in both directions for efficient energy man-agement. Cloud computing likewise offers features that can ensemble easily for smart grid software platforms [71]. Security and privacy of data is the highest priority issue for utilities and user both [72]. In addition, the problem of security proliferates when it is implemented with cloud infrastructure. An appropriate methodology should be there to save energy and utilities from scams and malicious attacks. A report by [69] proposed that one can use Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and managed PKI to confront security issue in smart grids. The next section discusses this issue in detail.
2.6.2 Social and Economic Factors
In smart cities, people get assistance with their social issues through technology that offers elementary platform services for urban development, backup, and communal management. This makes smart cities a one-step service system [62]. Furthermore, smart cities offer services to improve economics, banking, and business events for a smarterfinancial growth. The economic and social factors in case of smart cities are like communication, banking, andfinance. These factors also open to security and privacy attacks. The following section presents these issues in detail.
Challenges in Smart Communication
The communication sector of smart cities is open to a number of attack, viruses, scams, and confidentiality attacks. Telecommunication area is part critical infras-tructure in smart cities. There are various governance financial activities that are carried out over telecommunication and network. Hence, smart cities require some kind of secure and authenticated environment for this type of activities. Besides, M2M communication also offers some services to the residents of smart cities [73].
Hence, this type of communication also attracts the researcher in the field of security in smart cities. In the current era, people mainly communicate with each other with the help of smartphones and tablets. This area also leads to new pressures on the security field. Their privacy and security of information should also be considered. It is obvious that the more we use some technology, the more it becomes prone to attack [74]. All ICT technologies like cloud computing, Bluetooth, wireless networking, and IoT have their own role in smart cities.
Therefore, security related to these techniques should be taken into account while designing the structure of smart cities.
Individual Privacy
The information of an individual citizen of the smart city should be confidential.
People of smart city communicate with each other and use the services in number of ways by using modern technology that is connected using network and system.
These heterogeneous networks and system are on the target of the hackers and attackers. These attackers and hackers intrude in the confidential information of an individual and deprive individuals of their rights [64]. While considering an indi-vidual’s right of privacy, one thing that must be taken into account is social net-working. And this depends on the information provided by the individual and the method in which it can be utilized by the hacker or attacker. The providers of social networking provide adequate data to identify an individual’s profile [75].
Banking, Finance, and Business
The basic elements of smart cities are smart banking, economics, and business.
However, whereas the smart cities offer increase in economy, banking, and business sector, thesefields are also prone to attacks as one can attack for gaining financial gain. An attacker or a hacker can also negatively interfere with the economy of a society or the entire city.