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The Cybersecurity and Privacy in Smart Cities

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensor Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 January 2023) | Viewed by 4991

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Center of Excellence in Cybersecurity Research, Education and Outreach, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC 27411, USA
Interests: smart cities; cybersecurity; machine learning; data mining; affective computing; machine translation

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Smart cities have become the center of attention to governments and the private sector in the past few years, and they can potentially revolutionize the way we live, work, study, travel and do business. They use sensors, IoT and artificial intelligence to achieve significant efficiencies. They use a variety of communication technologies to provide access and transmit significant amounts of data. They use tremendous computing power to apply machine learning and data mining algorithms and analyze the data they collect to provide advice and support decision making in the city.

Many cities around the world have initiated smart cities projects. Examples of these are Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Dubai, Amsterdam, Singapore and London. A number of companies globally have made multi-billion dollar investments in various smart cities initiatives. These include Google, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Alibaba and Baidu. A lot can be learned from the smart cities, and the initiatives launched by large companies, around the globe.

Smart cities have a number of challenges to overcome. These challenges are in multiple domains, and include technical, social and administration challenges. Smart cities need to be highly interconnected and accessible to be able to provide citizens with the various values they promise. They are, therefore, a desirable target for hackers, and are vulnerable in a number of ways. Hardware vulnerabilities can pose security threats in a smart city environment. Some of these vulnerabilities are due to the fact that IoT devices are not made with security in mind. Sources of vulnerabilities include operating systems, software, websites, mobile apps and human error.

A smart city is not only able to create efficiency in our cities, it can also save lives, by, for example,  dealing with disasters and situations like the COVID-19 much more efficiently. As the population of the world grows, the efficient use of resources will become increasingly important; because smart cities are capable of doing this, they are becoming a necessity. Smart cities are therefore important in today’s world, and they deserve to be the focus of a Special Issue of their own. This Issue is devoted to the topic of ‘’Cybersecurity and Privacy in Smart Cities’’, as this is one of the main challenges of smart cities.

Dr. Hossein Sarrafzadeh
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Application Security Threat and Attack Modeling in Smart Cities
  • Security Monitoring and Alerting in Smart Cities
  • Blockchain Technologies in Smart Cities
  • IoT Security in Smart Cities
  • Cybersecurity Forensics in Smart Cities
  • Data Privacy in Smart Cities
  • Identity Management in Smart Cities
  • Security Policy, Analysis of Cyber-Risk and Trust in Smart Cities
  • Mobile App and Mobile Device Security in Smart Cities
  • Human Factors in Security and Privacy in Smart Cities

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

35 pages, 6472 KiB  
Article
BAuth-ZKP—A Blockchain-Based Multi-Factor Authentication Mechanism for Securing Smart Cities
by Md. Onais Ahmad, Gautami Tripathi, Farheen Siddiqui, Mohammad Afshar Alam, Mohd Abdul Ahad, Mohd Majid Akhtar and Gabriella Casalino
Sensors 2023, 23(5), 2757; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23052757 - 2 Mar 2023
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 4156
Abstract
The overwhelming popularity of technology-based solutions and innovations to address day-to-day processes has significantly contributed to the emergence of smart cities. where millions of interconnected devices and sensors generate and share huge volumes of data. The easy and high availability of rich personal [...] Read more.
The overwhelming popularity of technology-based solutions and innovations to address day-to-day processes has significantly contributed to the emergence of smart cities. where millions of interconnected devices and sensors generate and share huge volumes of data. The easy and high availability of rich personal and public data generated in these digitalized and automated ecosystems renders smart cities vulnerable to intrinsic and extrinsic security breaches. Today, with fast-developing technologies, the classical username and password approaches are no longer adequate to secure valuable data and information from cyberattacks. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) can provide an effective solution to minimize the security challenges associated with legacy single-factor authentication systems (both online and offline). This paper identifies and discusses the role and need of MFA for securing the smart city ecosystem. The paper begins by describing the notion of smart cities and the associated security threats and privacy issues. The paper further provides a detailed description of how MFA can be used for securing various smart city entities and services. A new concept of blockchain-based multi-factor authentication named “BAuth-ZKP” for securing smart city transactions is presented in the paper. The concept focuses on developing smart contracts between the participating entities within the smart city and performing the transactions with zero knowledge proof (ZKP)-based authentication in a secure and privacy-preserved manner. Finally, the future prospects, developments, and scope of using MFA in smart city ecosystem are discussed. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Cybersecurity and Privacy in Smart Cities)
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