Biblio

Wireless Sensor networks can be composed of smart buildings, smart homes, smart grids, and smart mobility, and they can even interconnect all these fields into a large-scale smart city network. Software-Defined Networking is an ideal technology to realize Internet-of-Things (IoT) Network and WSN network requirements and to efficiently enhance the security of these networks. Software defines Networking (SDN) is used to support IoT and WSN related networking elements, additional security concerns rise, due to the elevated vulnerability of such deployments to specific types of attacks and the necessity of inter-cloud communication any IoT application would require. This work is a study of different security mechanisms available in SDN for IoT and WSN network secure communication. This work also formulates the problems when existing methods are implemented with different networks parameters.

With the development of urbanization, the number of vehicles is gradually increasing, and vehicles are gradually developing in the direction of intelligence. How to ensure that the data of intelligent vehicles is not tampered in the process of transmission to the cloud is the key problem of current research. Therefore, we have established a data security transmission system based on blockchain. First, we collect and filter vehicle data locally, and then use blockchain technology to transmit key data. Through the smart contract, the key data is automatically and accurately transmitted to the surrounding node vehicles, and the vehicles transmit data to each other to form a transaction and spread to the whole network. The node data is verified through the node data consensus protocol of intelligent vehicle data security transmission system, and written into the block to form a blockchain. Finally, the vehicle user can query the transaction record through the vehicle address. The results show that we can safely and accurately transmit and query vehicle data in the blockchain database.

Roads are the backbone of our country, they play an important role for human progress. Roads seem to be dangerous and harmful for human beings on hills, near rivers, lakes and small ridges. It's possible with the help of IoT (Internet of things) to incorporate all the things made efficiently and effectively. IoT in combination with roads make daily life smart and excellent. This paper shows IoT technology will be the beginning of smart cities and it will reduce road accidents and collisions. If all vehicles are IoT based and connected with the internet, then an efficient method to guide, it performs urgent action, when less time is available. Internet and antenna technology in combination with IoT perform fully automation in our day-to-day life. It will provide excellent service as well as accuracy and precision.

Nowadays, smart cities (SCs) use technologies and different types of data collected to improve the lifestyles of their citizens. Indeed, connected smart vehicles are technologies used for an SC’s intelligent traffic monitoring systems (ITMSs). However, most proposed monitoring approaches do not consider realtime monitoring. This paper presents real-time data processing for an intelligent traffic monitoring dashboard using the Hadoop ecosystem dashboard components. Many data are available due to our proposed monitoring approach, such as the total number of vehicles on different routes and data on trucks within a radius (10KM) of a specific point given. Based on our generated data, we can make real-time decisions to improve circulation and optimize traffic flow.

This paper proposes a Mobile IoT optimization method for Next-Generation networks by evaluating a series of named-based techniques implemented in Information-Centric Networking (ICN). The idea is based on the possibility to have a more suitable naming and forwarding mechanism to be implemented in IoT. The main advantage of the method is in achieving a higher success packet rate and data rate by following the proposed technique even when the device is mobile / roaming around. The proposed technique is utilizing a root prefix naming which allows faster process and dynamic increase for content waiting time in Pending Interest Table (PIT). To test the idea, a simulation is carried out by mimicking how IoT can be implemented, especially in smart cities, where a user can also travel and not be static. Results show that the proposed technique can achieve up to a 13% interest success rate and an 18.7% data rate increase compared to the well-known implementation algorithms. The findings allow for possible further cooperation of data security factors and ensuring energy reduction through leveraging more processes at the edge node.

The security of embedded systems is particularly crucial given the prevalence of embedded devices in daily life, business, and national defense. Firmware for embedded systems poses a serious threat to the safety of society, business, and the nation because of its robust concealment, difficulty in detection, and extended maintenance cycle. This technology is now an essential part of the contemporary experience, be it in the smart office, smart restaurant, smart home, or even the smart traffic system. Despite the fact that these systems are often fairly effective, the rapid expansion of embedded systems in smart cities have led to inconsistencies and misalignments between secured and unsecured systems, necessitating the development of secure, hacker-proof embedded systems. To solve this issue, we created a sizable, original, and objective dataset that is based on the latest Linux vulnerabilities for identifying the embedded system vulnerabilities and we modified a cutting-edge machine learning model for the Linux Kernel. The paper provides an updated EVDD and analysis of an extensive dataset for embedded system based vulnerability detection and also an updated state of the art deep learning model for embedded system vulnerability detection. We kept our dataset available for all researchers for future experiments and implementation.

Technological innovations are expanding rapidly in the public safety sector providing opportunities for more targeted and comprehensive urban crime deterrence and detection. Yet, the spatial dispersion of crimes may vary over time. Therefore, it is unclear whether and how sensors can optimally impact crime rates. We developed a Smart City Digital Twin-based method to dynamically place license plate reader (LPR) sensors and improve their detection and deterrence performance. Utilizing continuously updated crime records, the convolutional long short-term memory algorithm predicted areas crimes were most likely to occur. Then, a Monte Carlo traffic simulation simulated suspect vehicle movements to determine the most likely routes to flee crime scenes. Dynamic LPR placement predictions were made weekly, capturing the spatiotemporal variation in crimes and enhancing LPR performance relative to static placement. We tested the proposed method in Warner Robins, GA, and results support the method's promise in detecting and deterring crime.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is a malicious attempt by attackers to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network. This is done by overwhelming the target and its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. The multiple compromised computer systems (bots or zombies) then act as sources of attack traffic. Exploited machines can include computers and other network resources such as IoT devices. The attack results in either degraded network performance or a total service outage of critical infrastructure. This can lead to heavy financial losses and reputational damage. These attacks maximise effectiveness by controlling the affected systems remotely and establishing a network of bots called bot networks. It is very difficult to separate the attack traffic from normal traffic. Early detection is essential for successful mitigation of the attack, which gives rise to a very important role in cybersecurity to detect the attacks and mitigate the effects. This can be done by deploying machine learning or deep learning models to monitor the traffic data. We propose using various machine learning and deep learning algorithms to analyse the traffic patterns and separate malicious traffic from normal traffic. Two suitable datasets have been identified (DDoS attack SDN dataset and CICDDoS2019 dataset). All essential preprocessing is performed on both datasets. Feature selection is also performed before detection techniques are applied. 8 different Neural Networks/ Ensemble/ Machine Learning models are chosen and the datasets are analysed. The best model is chosen based on the performance metrics (DEEP NEURAL NETWORK MODEL). An alternative is also suggested (Next best - Hypermodel). Optimisation by Hyperparameter tuning further enhances the accuracy. Based on the nature of the attack and the intended target, suitable mitigation procedures can then be deployed.

Cities are becoming increasingly smart as the Internet of Things (IoT) proliferates. With IoT devices interconnected, smart cities can offer novel and ubiquitous services as well as automate many of our daily lives (e.g., smart health, smart home). The abundance in the number of IoT devices leads to divergent types of security threats as well. One of such important attacks is the Distributed Denial of Service attack(DDoS). DDoS attacks have become increasingly common in the internet of things because of the rapid growth of insecure devices. These attacks slow down legitimate network requests. Although DDoS attacks were first reported in 1996, the sophistication of these attacks has increased significantly. In mid-August 2020, a 2 Terabytes per second(TBps) attack targeting critical infrastructure, such as finance, was reported. In the next two years, it is predicted that this number will double to 15 million attacks. Blockchain technology, whose development dates back to the advent of the internet, has become one of the most important advancements to come along since that time. Several applications can use this technology to secure exchanges. Using blockchain to mitigate DDoS attacks is discussed in this survey paper in diverse domains to date. Its purpose is to expose the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the different approaches to DDoS mitigation. As a research and development platform for DDoS mitigation, this paper will act as a central hub for a more comprehensive understanding of these approaches.

The development of science and technology has led to the construction of smart cities, and in this scenario, there are many applications that need to provide their real-time location information, which is very likely to cause the leakage of personal location privacy. To address this situation, this paper designs a location privacy protection scheme based on graph anonymity, which is based on the privacy protection idea of K-anonymity, and represents the spatial distribution among APs in the form of a graph model, using the method of finding clustered noisy fingerprint information in the graph model to ensure a similar performance to the real location fingerprint in the localization process, and thus will not be distinguished by the location providers. Experiments show that this scheme can improve the effectiveness of virtual locations and reduce the time cost using greedy strategy, which can effectively protect location privacy.

Resilience of urban infrastructure to sudden, system-wide, potentially catastrophic events is a critical need across domains. The growing connectivity of infrastructure, including its cyber-physical components which can be controlled in real time, offers an attractive path towards rapid adaptation to adverse events and adjustment of system objectives. However, existing work in the field often offers disjoint approaches that respond to particular scenarios. On the other hand, abstract work on control of complex systems focuses on attempting to adapt to the changes in the system dynamics or environment, but without understanding that the system may simply not be able to perform its original task after an adverse event. To address this challenge, this programmatic paper proposes a vision for a new paradigm of infrastructure resilience. Such a framework treats infrastructure across domains through a unified theory of controlled dynamical systems, but remains cognizant of the lack of knowledge about the system following a widespread adverse event and aims to identify the system's fundamental limits. As a result, it will enable the infrastructure operator to assess and assure system performance following an adverse event, even if the exact nature of the event is not yet known. Building off ongoing work on assured resilience of control systems, in this paper we identify promising early results, challenges that motivate the development of resilience theory for infrastructure system, and possible paths forward for the proposed effort.

Nowadays, microservice architecture is known as a successful and promising architecture for smart city applications. Applying microservices in the designing and implementation of systems has many advantages such as autonomy, loosely coupled, composability, scalability, fault tolerance. However, the complexity of calling between microservices leads to problems in security, accessibility, and data management in the execution of systems. In order to address these challenges, in recent years, various researchers and developers have focused on the use of microservice patterns in the implementation of microservice-based systems. Microservice patterns are the result of developers’ successful experiences in addressing common challenges in microservicebased systems. However, hitherto no guideline has been provided for an in-depth understanding of microservice patterns and how to apply them to real systems. The purpose of this paper is to investigate in detail the most widely used and important microservice patterns in order to analyze the function of each pattern, extract the behavioral signatures and construct a service dependency graph for them so that researchers and enthusiasts use the provided guideline to create a microservice-based system equipped with design patterns. To construct the proposed guideline, five real open source projects have been carefully investigated and analyzed and the results obtained have been used in the process of making the guideline.

Big data exchange is an emerging problem in the context of big data management and analytics. In big data exchange, multiple entities exchange big datasets beyond the common data integration or data sharing paradigms, mostly in the context of data federation architectures. How to make big data exchange while ensuring privacy preservation constraintsƒ The latter is a critical research challenge that is gaining momentum on the research community, especially due to the wide family of application scenarios where it plays a critical role (e.g., social networks, bio-informatics tools, smart cities systems and applications, and so forth). Inspired by these considerations, in this paper we provide an overview of models and issues in the context of privacy-preserving big data exchange research, along with a selection of future research directions that will play a critical role in next-generation research.

This paper presents a novel authentication method based on a distributed version of Kerberos for UAVs. One of the major problems of UAVs in recent years has been cyber-attacks which allow attackers to control the UAV or access its information. The growing use of UAVs has encouraged us to investigate the methods of their protection especially authentication of their users. In the past, the Kerberos system was rarely used for authentication in UAV systems. In our proposed method, based on a distributed version of Kerberos, we can authenticate multiple ground stations, users, and controllers for one or more UAVs. This method considers most of the security aspects to protect UAV systems mainly in the authentication phase and improves the security of UAVs and ground control stations and their communications considerably.

Operating systems are essential software components for any computer. The goal of computer system manu-facturers is to provide a safe operating system that can resist a range of assaults. APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats) are merely one kind of attack used by hackers to penetrate organisations (APT). Here, we will apply the MITRE ATT&CK approach to analyze the security of Windows and Linux. Using the results of a series of vulnerability tests conducted on Windows 7, 8, 10, and Windows Server 2012, as well as Linux 16.04, 18.04, and its most current version, we can establish which operating system offers the most protection against future assaults. In addition, we have shown adversarial reflection in response to threats. We used ATT &CK framework tools to launch attacks on both platforms.

With their variety of application verticals, smart cities represent a killer scenario for Cloud-IoT computing, e.g. fog computing. Such applications require a management capable of satisfying all their requirements through suitable service placements, and of balancing among QoS-assurance, operational costs, deployment security and, last but not least, energy consumption and carbon emissions. This keynote discusses these aspects over a motivating use case and points to some open challenges.

There is momentous attention from researchers and practitioners all over the world towards one of the most advanced trends in the world, Smart cities. A smart city is an efficient and sustainable city that offers a superior life quality to all human beings through the optimum management of all its resources. Optimum energy management technique within the smart city is a challenging environment that needs a full focus on basic important needs and supports of the smart city. This includes Smart Grid (SG) infrastructure, Distributed Generation (DG) technology, Smart Home Energy Management System (HEMS), Smart Transportation System (STS), and Energy Storage System (ESS). Out of these five taxonomies, there have been some disputes addressed in profitability and security due to the major involvement of electromobility in the smart transportation system. It creates a big impact on the smart city environment. The disputes in profitability can be effectively handled with the use of dynamic pricing techniques and peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading mechanisms. On the other hand, security disputes can be overwhelmed by the use of blockchain technology. This paper reviews the energy management-related work on smart cities with the consideration of these basic important needs and supports.

In this paper we consider cyber security requirements of the smart buildings. We identify cyber risks, threats, attack scenarios, security objectives and related security controls. The work was done as a part of a smart building design and construction work. From the controls identified w e concluded security practices for engineering-in smart buildings security. The paper provides an idea toward which system security engineers can strive in the basic design and implementation of the most critical components of the smart buildings. The intent of the concept is to help practitioners to avoid ad hoc approaches in the development of security mechanisms for smart buildings with shared space.

In order to solve the problem of untargeted data security grading methods in the process of power grid data governance, this paper analyzes the mainstream data security grading standards at home and abroad, investigates and sorts out the characteristics of power grid data security grading requirements, and proposes a method that considers national, social, and A grid data security classification scheme for the security impact of four dimensions of individuals and enterprises. The plan determines the principle of power grid data security classification. Based on the basic idea of “who will be affected to what extent and to what extent when the power grid data security is damaged”, it defines three classification factors that need to be considered: the degree of impact, the scope of influence, and the objects of influence, and the power grid data is divided into five security levels. In the operation stage of power grid data security grading, this paper sorts out the experience and gives the recommended grading process. This scheme basically conforms to the status quo of power grid data classification, and lays the foundation for power grid data governance.

Smart city management is going through a remarkable transition, in terms of quality and diversity of services provided to the end-users. The stakeholders that deliver pervasive applications are now able to address fundamental challenges in the big data value chain, from data acquisition, data analysis and processing, data storage and curation, and data visualisation in real scenarios. Industry 4.0 is pushing this trend forward, demanding for servitization of products and data, also for the smart cities sector where humans, sensors and devices are operating in strict collaboration. The data produced by the ubiquitous devices must be processed quickly to allow the implementation of reactive services such as situational awareness, video surveillance and geo-localization, while always ensuring the safety and privacy of involved citizens. This paper proposes a modular architecture to (i) leverage innovative technologies for data acquisition, management and distribution (such as Apache Kafka and Apache NiFi), (ii) develop a multi-layer engineering solution for revealing valuable and hidden societal knowledge in smart cities environment, and (iii) tackle the main issues in tasks involving complex data flows and provide general guidelines to solve them. We derived some guidelines from an experimental setting performed together with leading industrial technical departments to accomplish an efficient system for monitoring and servitization of smart city assets, with a scalable platform that confirms its usefulness in numerous smart city use cases with different needs.

Control room video surveillance is an important source of information for ensuring public safety. To facilitate the process, a Decision-Support System (DSS) designed for the security task force is vital and necessary to take decisions rapidly using a sea of information. In case of mission critical operation, Situational Awareness (SA) which consists of knowing what is going on around you at any given time plays a crucial role across a variety of industries and should be placed at the center of our DSS. In our approach, SA system will take advantage of the human factor thanks to the reinforcement signal whereas previous work on this field focus on improving knowledge level of DSS at first and then, uses the human factor only for decision-making. In this paper, we propose a situational awareness-centric decision-support system framework for mission-critical operations driven by Quality of Experience (QoE). Our idea is inspired by the reinforcement learning feedback process which updates the environment understanding of our DSS. The feedback is injected by a QoE built on user perception. Our approach will allow our DSS to evolve according to the context with an up-to-date SA.

Smart cities deploy large numbers of sensors and collect a tremendous amount of data from them. For example, Advanced Metering Infrastructures (AMIs), which consist of physical meters that collect usage data about public utilities such as power and water, are an important building block in a smart city. In a typical sensor network, the measurement devices are connected through a computer network, which exposes them to cyber attacks. Furthermore, the data is centrally managed at the operator’s servers, making it vulnerable to insider threats.Our goal is to protect the integrity of data collected by large-scale sensor networks and the firmware in measurement devices from cyber attacks and insider threats. To this end, we first develop a comprehensive threat model for attacks against data and firmware integrity, which can target any of the stakeholders in the operation of the sensor network. Next, we use our threat model to analyze existing defense mechanisms, including signature checks, remote firmware attestation, anomaly detection, and blockchain-based secure logs. However, the large size of the Trusted Computing Base and a lack of scalability limit the applicability of these existing mechanisms. We propose the Feather-Light Blockchain Infrastructure (FLBI) framework to address these limitations. Our framework leverages a two-layer architecture and cryptographic threshold signature chains to support large networks of low-capacity devices such as meters and data aggregators. We have fully implemented the FLBI’s end-to-end functionality on the Hyperledger Fabric and private Ethereum blockchain platforms. Our experiments show that the FLBI is able to support millions of end devices.

With the proliferation of data in Internet-related applications, incidences of cyber security have increased manyfold. Energy management, which is one of the smart city layers, has also been experiencing cyberattacks. Furthermore, the Distributed Energy Resources (DER), which depend on different controllers to provide energy to the main physical smart grid of a smart city, is prone to cyberattacks. The increased cyber-attacks on DER systems are mainly because of its dependency on digital communication and controls as there is an increase in the number of devices owned and controlled by consumers and third parties. This paper analyzes the major cyber security and privacy challenges that might inflict, damage or compromise the DER and related controllers in smart cities. These challenges highlight that the security and privacy on the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, artificial intelligence, and smart grid, which are the building blocks of a smart city, must be addressed in the DER sector. It is observed that the security and privacy challenges in smart cities can be solved through the distributed framework, by identifying and classifying stakeholders, using appropriate model, and by incorporating fault-tolerance techniques.

Simulations have gained paramount importance in terms of software development for wireless sensor networks and have been a vital focus of the scientific community in this decade to provide efficient, secure, and safe communication in smart cities. Network Simulators are widely used for the development of safe and secure communication architectures in smart city. Therefore, in this technical survey report, we have conducted experimental comparisons among ten different simulation environments that can be used to simulate smart-city operations. We comprehensively analyze and compare simulators COOJA, NS-2 with framework Mannasim, NS-3, OMNeT++ with framework Castalia, WSNet, TOSSIM, J-Sim, GloMoSim, SENSE, and Avrora. These simulators have been run eight times each and comparison among them is critically scrutinized. The main objective behind this research paper is to assist developers and researchers in selecting the appropriate simulator against the scenario to provide safe and secure wired and wireless networks. In addition, we have discussed the supportive simulation environments, functions, and operating modes, wireless channel models, energy consumption models, physical, MAC, and network-layer protocols in detail. The selection of these simulation frameworks is based on features, literature, and important characteristics. Lastly, we conclude our work by providing a detailed comparison and describing the pros and cons of each simulator.

Vendor cybersecurity risk assessment is of critical importance to smart city infrastructure and sustainability of the autonomous mobility ecosystem. Lack of engagement in cybersecurity policies and process implementation by the tier companies providing hardware or services to OEMs within this ecosystem poses a significant risk to not only the individual companies but to the ecosystem overall. The proposed quantitative method of estimating cybersecurity risk allows vendors to have visibility to the financial risk associated with potential threats and to consequently allocate adequate resources to cybersecurity. It facilitates faster implementation of defense measures and provides a useful tool in the vendor selection process. The paper focuses on cybersecurity risk assessment as a critical part of the overall company mission to create a sustainable structure for maintaining cybersecurity health. Compound cybersecurity risk and impact on company operations as outputs of this quantitative analysis present a unique opportunity to strategically plan and make informed decisions towards acquiring a reputable position in a sustainable ecosystem. This method provides attack trees and assigns a risk factor to each vendor thus offering a competitive advantage and an insight into the supply chain risk map. This is an innovative way to look at vendor cybersecurity posture. Through a selection of unique industry specific parameters and a modular approach, this risk assessment model can be employed as a tool to navigate the supply base and prevent significant financial cost. It generates synergies within the connected vehicle ecosystem leading to a safe and sustainable economy.