Security and Privacy of Smart Cities: A Survey, Research Issues and Challenges

With recent advances of information and communication technology, smart city has been emerged as a new paradigm to dynamically optimize the resources in cities and provide better facilities and quality of life for the citizens. Smart cities involve a variety of components, including ubiquitous sensing devices, heterogeneous networks, large-scale databases, and powerful data centers to collect, transfer, store, and intelligently process real-time information. Smart cities can offer new applications and services for augmenting the daily life of citizens on making decisions, energy consumption, transportation, health-care, and education. Despite the potential vision of smart cities, security and privacy issues remain to be carefully addressed. This paper delineates a comprehensive survey of security and privacy issues of smart cities, and presents a basis for categorizing the present and future developments within this area. It also presents a thematic taxonomy of security and privacy issues of smart cities to highlight the security requirements for designing a secure smart city, identify the existing security and privacy solutions, and present open research issues and challenges of security and privacy in smart cities.