Future challenges for smart cities: Cyber-security and digital forensics

Smart cities are comprised of diverse and interconnected components constantly exchanging data and facilitating improved living for a nation's population. Our view of a typical smart city consists of four key components, namely, Smart Grids, Building Automation Systems (BAS), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Smart Vehicles; with enabling Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and the Cloud platform. The adversarial threats and criminal misuses in a smart city are increasingly heterogenous and significant, with provisioning of resilient and end-to-end security being a daunting task. When a cyber incident involving critical components of the smart city infrastructure occurs, appropriate measures can be taken to identify and enumerate concrete evidence to facilitate the forensic investigation process. Forensic preparedness and lessons learned from past forensic analysis can help protect the smart city against future incidents. This paper presents a holistic view of the security landscape of a smart city, identifying security threats and providing deep insight into digital investigation in the context of the smart city.