Privacy in the Smart City - Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions

Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this, we believe that a better understanding of smart cities and their privacy implications is needed. We therefore systematize the application areas, enabling technologies, privacy types, attackers and data sources for the attacks, giving structure to the fuzzy term “smart city”. Based on our taxonomies, we describe existing privacy-enhancing technologies, review the state of the art in real cities around the world, and discuss promising future research directions. Our survey can serve as a reference guide, contributing to the development of privacy-friendly smart cities

Sensing as a Service Model for Smart Cities Supported by Internet of Things

The world population is growing at a rapid pace. Towns and cities are accommodating half of the world's population thereby creating tremendous pressure on every aspect of urban living. Cities are known to have large concentration of resources and facilities. Such environments attract people from rural areas. However, unprecedented attraction has now become an overwhelming issue for city governance and politics. The enormous pressure towards efficient city management has triggered various Smart City initiatives by both government and private sector businesses to invest in ICT to find sustainable solutions to the growing issues. The Internet of Things (IoT) has also gained significant attention over the past decade. IoT envisions to connect billions of sensors to the Internet and expects to use them for efficient and effective resource management in Smart Cities. Today infrastructure, platforms, and software applications are offered as services using cloud technologies. In this paper, we explore the concept of sensing as a service and how it fits with the Internet of Things. Our objective is to investigate the concept of sensing as a service model in technological, economical, and social perspectives and identify the major open challenges and issues.Comment: Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 2014 (Accepted for Publication

Smart cities and heritage conservation: developing a smartheritage agenda for sustainable inclusive communities

This paper discusses the potential of current advancements in Information Communication Technologies (ICT) for cultural heritage preservation, valorization and management within contemporary cities. The paper highlights the potential of virtual environments to assess the impacts of heritage policies on urban development. It does so by discussing the implications of virtual globes and crowdsourcing to support the participatory valuation and management of cultural heritage assets. To this purpose, a review of available valuation techniques is here presented together with a discussion on how these techniques might be coupled with ICT tools to promote inclusive governance

A privacy-preserving user authentication mechanism for smart city mobile apps

In the dawn of the 5G era, the advances in mobile communications have created a suitable environment for the emergence of a wide spectrum of Smart City mobile applications that will play a significant role towards the improvement of citizens' life quality in the upcoming years. It is expected that Smart City mobile applications will allow citizens to access numerous and diverse services, provided by third-party Service Providers, through their mobile devices (e.g., smartphones). However, in order for the emerging Smart City mobile applications to gain the trust of all involved stakeholders and reach their full potential in the 5G market, many security and privacy concerns should be addressed in advance. Towards this direction, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving user authentication mechanism, developed in the context of the Mobilizador5G project, in order to: (a) provide mobile users with efficient and effective means to authenticate towards Service Providers, while preventing user identification and tracking; (b) allow anonymity revocation in case of user misbehavior; (c) avoid multiple user profiles creation on the Service Provider side; and (d) enable easy integration in current mobile application implementations

Building the Hyperconnected Society- Internet of Things Research and Innovation Value Chains, Ecosystems and Markets

This book aims to provide a broad overview of various topics of Internet of Things (IoT), ranging from research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies, nanoelectronics, cyber-physical systems, architecture, interoperability and industrial applications. All this is happening in a global context, building towards intelligent, interconnected decision making as an essential driver for new growth and co-competition across a wider set of markets. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC – Internet of Things European Research Cluster from research to technological innovation, validation and deployment.The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda, and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, innovation, development and deployment of IoT in future years. The concept of IoT could disrupt consumer and industrial product markets generating new revenues and serving as a growth driver for semiconductor, networking equipment, and service provider end-markets globally. This will create new application and product end-markets, change the value chain of companies that creates the IoT technology and deploy it in various end sectors, while impacting the business models of semiconductor, software, device, communication and service provider stakeholders. The proliferation of intelligent devices at the edge of the network with the introduction of embedded software and app-driven hardware into manufactured devices, and the ability, through embedded software/hardware developments, to monetize those device functions and features by offering novel solutions, could generate completely new types of revenue streams. Intelligent and IoT devices leverage software, software licensing, entitlement management, and Internet connectivity in ways that address many of the societal challenges that we will face in the next decade