As homes, workplaces, and cities digitally transform during our Fourth Industrial Revolution, many of those charged with securing this digital future can find it difficult to “level up” from the endpoints and focus on defining and solving the larger problem sets. It is easy to get bogged down in the myriad of smart and smart-enough devices that constitute “IoT” in isolation of the overall security scope of the smart city – losing both valuable context and constraints.
While “smart city” can mean a bunch of things to different people, for city planners and officials, it’s definition and implementation problems are quite well understood. The vendors that come knocking on their doors promote point solutions – smart traffic control systems, 5G and ultra-high bandwidth wireless communications, driverless vehicles, etc. – leaving the cities’ IT, operational technology (OT), and infosec teams to bring it all together.
An essential part of a security professional’s work is diving deep into the flaws and perils of individual products and clusters of technologies. But trying to “solve security” at a city level is an entirely different paradigm.
A substantial number of my peers and security researchers I’ve worked with over the past couple of decades have focused their energies on securing autonomous vehicles. The threats are varied – ranging from bypassing emission and speed controls to evading the next generation of city road taxes and insurance regulations to malicious remote control of someone else’s vehicle – yet mostly isolated to the vehicles themselves. From what I’m seeing and hearing, they’re doing a great job in securing these vehicles. Their security successes also advance traditional transit solutions, which helps smart cities keep pace with the transportation needs of a growing population.
Given the ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
