Security and Privacy in Smart City Applications: Challenges and Solutions

With the flourishing and advancement of the IoT, the smart city has become an emerging paradigm, consisting of ubiquitous sensing, heterogeneous network infrastructure, and intelligent information processing and control systems. A smart city can monitor the physical world in real time, and provide intelligent services to both local residents and travelers in terms of transportation, healthcare, environment, entertainment, and energy. However, security and privacy concerns arise, since smart city applications not only collect a wide range of privacy-sensitive information from people and their social circles, but also control city facilities and influence people's lives. In this article, we investigate security and privacy in smart city applications. Specifically, we first introduce promising smart city applications and architecture. Then we discuss several security and privacy challenges in these applications. Some research efforts are subsequently presented to address these security and privacy challenges for intelligent healthcare, transportation, and smart energy. Finally, we point out some open issues for future research.