Security and the smart city: A systematic review

The implementation of smart technology in cities is often hailed as the solution to many urban challenges such as transportation, waste management, and environmental protection. Issues of security and crime prevention, however, are in many cases neglected. Moreover, when researchers do introduce new smart security technologies, they rarely discuss their implementation or question how new smart city security might affect traditional policing and urban planning processes. This systematic review explores the recent literature concerned with new ‘smart city’ security technologies and aims to investigate to what extent these new interventions correspond with traditional functions of security interventions. Through an extensive literature search we compiled a list of security interventions for smart cities and suggest several changes to the conceptual status quo in the field. Ultimately, we propose three clear categories to categorise security interventions in smart cities: Those interventions that use new sensors but traditional actuators, those that seek to make old systems smart, and those that introduce entirely new functions. These themes are then discussed in detail and the importance of each group of interventions for the overall field of urban security and governance is assessed

Your Smart Home Can't Keep a Secret: Towards Automated Fingerprinting of IoT Traffic with Neural Networks

The IoT (Internet of Things) technology has been widely adopted in recent years and has profoundly changed the people's daily lives. However, in the meantime, such a fast-growing technology has also introduced new privacy issues, which need to be better understood and measured. In this work, we look into how private information can be leaked from network traffic generated in the smart home network. Although researchers have proposed techniques to infer IoT device types or user behaviors under clean experiment setup, the effectiveness of such approaches become questionable in the complex but realistic network environment, where common techniques like Network Address and Port Translation (NAPT) and Virtual Private Network (VPN) are enabled. Traffic analysis using traditional methods (e.g., through classical machine-learning models) is much less effective under those settings, as the features picked manually are not distinctive any more. In this work, we propose a traffic analysis framework based on sequence-learning techniques like LSTM and leveraged the temporal relations between packets for the attack of device identification. We evaluated it under different environment settings (e.g., pure-IoT and noisy environment with multiple non-IoT devices). The results showed our framework was able to differentiate device types with a high accuracy. This result suggests IoT network communications pose prominent challenges to users' privacy, even when they are protected by encryption and morphed by the network gateway. As such, new privacy protection methods on IoT traffic need to be developed towards mitigating this new issue

Big Data Model Simulation on a Graph Database for Surveillance in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Sensors are present in various forms all around the world such as mobile phones, surveillance cameras, smart televisions, intelligent refrigerators and blood pressure monitors. Usually, most of the sensors are a part of some other system with similar sensors that compose a network. One of such networks is composed of millions of sensors connect to the Internet which is called Internet of things (IoT). With the advances in wireless communication technologies, multimedia sensors and their networks are expected to be major components in IoT. Many studies have already been done on wireless multimedia sensor networks in diverse domains like fire detection, city surveillance, early warning systems, etc. All those applications position sensor nodes and collect their data for a long time period with real-time data flow, which is considered as big data. Big data may be structured or unstructured and needs to be stored for further processing and analyzing. Analyzing multimedia big data is a challenging task requiring a high-level modeling to efficiently extract valuable information/knowledge from data. In this study, we propose a big database model based on graph database model for handling data generated by wireless multimedia sensor networks. We introduce a simulator to generate synthetic data and store and query big data using graph model as a big database. For this purpose, we evaluate the well-known graph-based NoSQL databases, Neo4j and OrientDB, and a relational database, MySQL.We have run a number of query experiments on our implemented simulator to show that which database system(s) for surveillance in wireless multimedia sensor networks is efficient and scalable