Building a Security Framework for Smart Cities: A Case Study from UAE

Smart cities have evolved in the last years, leading the cities to implement initiatives related to technical aspects to improve quality of life. City-rankings have become a central tool for assessing the attractiveness of urban regions. The development of smart cities, however, is not without risk. Cities and citizens are putting more and more responsibilities in urban systems. Hence, all key stakeholders should provide an effective safety and security response to any situation affecting their citizens or organizations. Special attention should be paid with respect to development of services aimed at reducing cybercrime. To prevent this, we believe that a better understanding of smart cities and their privacy implications is needed. The paper provides an overview of security aspects of a cyber security in smart cities. It starts with exploration of various definitions, threats, and risks in cyber security as well as threats from environments both internal and external and how these threats are currently mitigated with tools, processes and technologies as smart cities utilizes IoT with big data. Presently, most of the data is transmitted and collected online. Hackers usually try to exploit the vulnerabilities using various tools in order to know more about the customers and then misuse the customer’s information. Enterprises, on the other hand, continue to collect more information in order to improve services, infrastructure, and security. They collect tons of data from customers in order to complete their requirements for the different services they provide. The main concern with the collected data is that it can be vulnerable to misuse by hackers. Building a security framework based on concepts and repositories of big data and leveraging on the intelligence of predictive analytics can help build a security system that can counter these threats and help to guard from these risk and threats to a large extent. Various concepts, applications, and technologies interact to cover every aspect of the digital citizen’s life. Understanding this privacy-challenging environment is the basic requirement for the development of effective protection mechanisms. Thus, the paper aims to address sentiments on cyber security technologies and cybercrime awareness in order to come up with recommendations for innovative solutions. A survey has been conducted and the findings have been analyzed of a case study to come up with recommendations for building a conceptualizing security framework for smart cities. The survey is conducted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), one of the most advanced countries in the MENA region, who is applying smart city concepts.