Designing Secure IoT Architectures for Smart City Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents itself as a promising set of technologies to support a wide range of applications that aim to improve the quality of life of humans. IoT aims to simplify the way that users receive information providing a unique way of bringing them close to the source of information, hiding the complexity of knowing who or what one should ask to get that information. For this reason, IoT has become a key enabler for smart city applications, and municipalities are very interested to invest in IoT for providing advanced applications to their citizens, who might not be at all familiar with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). It is quite common in the last few years that large cities are forming strategic agendas for becoming “smarter” through IoT technologies. Their main goal is to build IoT-based infrastructures that can be reused for supporting a plethora of smart city applications, for, i.e., monitoring the weather conditions, the traffic, the citizens’ needs, or for managing the wastes, the city waters, etc. All these applications are indeed very promising for making the cities smarter, but as they are becoming more and more mainstream, they are turning into attractive targets for attackers that aim to exploit the constrained nature of IoT devices toward stealing personal data or performing physical attacks on critical infrastructures. IoT deployments pose severe challenges with regard to ensuring the security of the overall system and the privacy of the users’ data, and only lately there have been advances toward designing secure IoT architectures for smart city applications. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the challenges, the methodology, and the latest attempts for securing the IoT architectures in smart city environments.