Physical Layer Communication Security in Smart Cities: Challenges and Threats Identification

Communication technologies will have tremendous presence in modern smart cities, providing means for massive data collection, plethora of services and technical management and control. However, as the complexity of the underlying communication systems increases, so do the security challenges and risks, which raises concerns about the smart city technology in general. Standard communication security approaches implemented in conventional wireless and wired networks are typically focused only on specific protocols and communication schemes, and, hence, are not well grounded for smart cities from the complexity and diversity point of view. In this paper, we discuss physical layer communication security challenges and risks in smart cities. We argue that, besides higher-level information protection, an appropriate framework for intrusion detection and threat/attack classification and identification is of utmost importance. For this purpose, we propose to use methods based on applying automatic modulation classification (AMC) systems. We provide overview of the appropriate AMC schemes, and discuss their properties, advantages and disadvantages in tackling the security challenges.