Towards Secure Urban Infrastructures: Cyber Security Challenges to Information and Communication Technology in Smart Cities

The growth of cities continues to be a global megatrend. As more and more people live in urban areas and urban services and infrastructures are under growing strain, technologies are increasingly being researched and used to make city life more efficient and comfortable. As a result, so-called “Smart Cities” have complex IT infrastructures and cyber-physical systems such as sensor/actuator networks for the general population and are developing worldwide. Urban infrastructure must be secured against attacks, ensuring reliable and resilient services for citizens as well as privacy and data security. This paper introduces selected challenges faced by infrastructure providers, citizens and decision-makers in handling attacks aimed at information and communication technologies (ICT) of urban infrastructures and presents current research avenues for tackling cyberattacks and for developing tools for creating, portraying and disseminating actionable information as one important response to security challenges. It then presents findings from a representative survey conducted in Germany (N=1091) on the experiences and perceptions of citizens concerning the relevance of cyberattacks will be presented