An Empirical Analysis of Smart City Vulnerabilities and Exploits through Real-World Case Studies

Abstract

The growth in the human population brings new socioeconomic and environmental hazards. In modern times, the world is heading toward smart city advancement to overcome the present and future challenges of urban crowding. Millions of intelligent devices communicate with each other to provide more innovative services ranging from smart health to smart grids. Smart city services endeavor the urban socioeconomic development with the most significant opportunities to improve the quality and ease of life. Smart cities' key enablers and drivers are IoT cloud-based technologies and artificial intelligence solutions. Inevitably, these imperatives promote smart cities for urban socioeconomic and the caliber of life enrichment. Security and privacy threats must be considered when any mechanism is developed and implemented in smart cities. Considering smart cities, security, privacy, and trust are prominent issues which may hamper the adoption and growth of smart city services. This paper narrowed down and examined the security and privacy threats associated with each layer of smart city services, the exploitation of vulnerabilities in each layer, and the communication technologies to be adapted in a few smart city services are discussed. The review of this study may provide helpful research frameworks and serve as a guide for the security and privacy standards in smart city services.