End Node Security and Trust vulnerabilities in the Smart City Infrastructure

Abstract

As cities gradually introduce intelligence in their core services and infrastructure thus becoming "smart cities", they are deploying new Information Technology devices in the urban grid that are interconnected to a broad network. The main focus of widely implemented smart cities' services was the operation of sensors and smart devices across city areas that need low energy consumption and high connectivity. However, as 5G technologies are gradually been adopted in the smart city infrastructure thus solving that problem, the fundamental issue of addressing security becomes dominant. While latest network topologies and standards include security functions thus giving an illusion of security, there is little focus on the fact that many smart city end nodes cannot realize all security specifications without additional help. In this paper, we discuss briefly smart city security issues and focus on problem and security requirement that need to be address in the smart city end nodes, the sensors and actuators deployed within the city's grid. In this paper, attacks that cannot be thwarted by traditional cybersecurity solutions are discussed and countermeasures based on hardware are suggested in order to achieve a high level of trust. Also, the danger of microarchitectural and side channel attacks on these devices is highlighted and protection approaches are discussed.