Abstract:

Advances in technology, population increase, climate change, international business and sustainability, now mandate the need for smart cities in order to accommodate increasing demands. However, current implementations of smart cities lack the security architecture to interlace all the essential components such as effective development, monitoring, and administration. Currently, many computer-based systems pose a high security risk due to the lack of a secure architecture which integrates these various components, opening the possibility for lapses in communication which can be exploited by cyber-attacks, and can prove to be extremely costly from a disaster recovery perspective. With no concrete definitions available to define a smart city, it is paramount to define a highly secure operating architecture for computer-based system which can be integrated within smart city implementations capable of supporting essential components such as energy distribution, health support, transport management, etc. A system built with such an essential security architecture can be more effective in preventing attacks and thereby increasing the system’s availability and reliability through secure operations. The proposed architecture achieves this by incorporating the a novel application of the monitor concept which would allow any implementation to be more practical and realizable for many computer based systems currently being used in smart cities.