Making smart cities cyber-secure

Making smart cities cyber-secure

News:

1. The article discusses about the cyber security challenges and the threats that integrated technologies in a smart city pose along with efficient delivery of services.

Important Facts:

2. India’s digitalisation roadmap is expected to propel its digital economy to 1 trillion USD by 2025. India is witnessing an unforeseen digital transformation, and at the same time, a rapid rate of urbanisation.
3. The Government of India’s 100 Smart Cities Mission blends these digitalisation and urbanisation waves, and endeavours to accomplish urban renewal through a Pan-City Smart Solutions initiative, and technology-enabled ‘city improvement (retrofitting), city renewal (redevelopment) and city extension (greenfield development)’.

Note

Smart Cities Mission:

• It is an urban renewal and retrofitting program by the Government of India with the mission to develop 100 cities across the country making them citizen friendly and sustainable.
• The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, is the nodal ministry for this mission. The Mission will cover 100 cities and its duration will be five years from 2015 to 2020.
• The significance of the Smart Cities Mission can be judged from the fact that its allocation was doubled during Budget 2018-19 to ₹2.04 lakh crore.

4. While the smart city initiative focuses on sustainable development of our cities and harnessing digital technologies for integrated citizen service delivery, it demands a strong focus on cyber security.
5. The Indian Smart City technology architecture is based on four logical layers of sensors, communication, data and application layers. The technology across these four layers works in an integrated manner to deliver smart city services.
6. Benefits of Information and Computing Technologies (ICT) and Internet of Things in a Smart City:

• Smart energy meters, security devices, smart appliances for health and domestic life offer unprecedented conveniences and improved quality of life.
• Cities get cleaner due to monitoring and technology is being deployed in road construction, property tax management, water management and waste management etc.
• The artificial intelligence based solutions is an example of smart infrastructure, eg. a smart pole that combines the benefits of LED lighting, Wi-Fi connection, surveillance cameras and mobile connectivity.

7. Challenges:

Cyber attacks, which earlier targeted data centres, are now directed towards numerous systems and devices spread across a smart city. A single intrusion may leave the entire smart city network compromised.

Hence, connected IoT (internet of things) devices need to be protected, including software, hardware and data.

• Security governance: There is no security organisation responsible for ensuring cyber security within smart cities. Additionally, there is no or limited consideration of cyber security during the various phases of smart city development.
• Budget allocation:  Limited budget is allocated for cyber security in the overall smart city budget. Even when a budget is allocated, it does not match the risk profile of smart cities, thereby making the process of setting up adequate defences a difficult proposition.
• Security products selection and implementation: Business-driven risk assessments are not conducted to identify appropriate security products based on the risk profile of the smart city. Additionally, there are no baseline security guidelines for implementation and configuration of security products.
• Cyber security capability and awareness: Smart city stakeholders have low awareness of cyber security risks and vulnerabilities. Further, the stakeholders responsible for securing the smart cities, have limited cyber security capabilities.
• Review and monitoring mechanism: There is no mechanism in place to regularly perform security assessments of the smart city set-up in order to identify and mitigate security risks on a continual basis.

8. Steps taken to strengthen ICT infrastructure in smart cities:

• Recognising cyber security as a key priority, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) published the ‘Cyber Security Framework for Smart Cities’ in May 2016 and issued an advisory to all smart cities to drive conformance to this framework. The report acknowledges that cyber security is the combined responsibility of various stakeholders.

9. Eleven Integrated Control and Command Centres have been installed at Ahmedabad, Kakinada, Visakhapatnam, Nagpur and Pune, among others.

Note

Securing Smart Cities: It is a not-for-profit global initiative that aims to solve the existing and future cybersecurity problems of smart cities through collaboration between companies, governments, media outlets, other not-for-profit initiatives and individuals across the world.