Secured Distributed Processing and Dissemination of Information in Smart City Environments

In the near future, smart cities are expected to provide their digital citizens with a new generation of real-time and time-critical, location-, social-, and context-aware services that leverage capillary Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures providing a constant stream of information. However, the multitude and pervasiveness of IoT-based IT services in smart city environments raise significant security issues, as they present a massive attack surface. This is further exacerbated in humanitarian assistance and disaster recovery (HADR) scenarios, which often involve partnerships between civilian and military organizations. To date, HADR operations have mostly leveraged the deployment of ad hoc communication systems with limited or no connection to IT infrastructures in the affected cites. In the future, they will increasingly rely on smart city infrastructure systems such as traffic monitoring systems, smart utility networks, and public transportation systems for building and maintaining enhanced situational awareness. The military has been increasingly looking toward IoT as an extremely valuable, although not entirely reliable, information source for situational awareness purposes. More specifically, appropriate and robust security and trust management measures need to be deployed to ensure the availability, confidentiality, and integrity of information throughout its life cycle. This is particularly complicated considering the different ownership, administration domains, and policies that apply to these military and civilian assets and services. This article reports on the methodologies and tools proposed within the NATO IST-147 Research Task Group (RTG) on Military Applications of IoT that recently concluded its three-year activity, as well as the planned activities in the follow-up IST-176 RTG on Federated Interoperability of Military C2 and IoT Systems.