An Agenda for Establishing Secure and Resilient Smart Cities

by Dr. Steve Griffiths

The Rise of Smart Cities 

Today more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and by 2050 this percentage is expected to rise to nearly 70 percent. In parallel to rapid growth in urbanization, technological progress has led to the mass proliferation of digital information about people, places, and things that can be rapidly transmitted and analyzed with increasingly powerful networking technologies and analytical tools. This digital proliferation is synonymous with the internet-of-things, or IoT, and has converged with urbanization to create the paradigm of “smart” cities.

A smart city is not just technologically advanced; it is a platform for the sustainable and inclusive enhancement of nearly all aspects of society. However, achieving such positive outcomes as smart cities evolve is not a simple task.  

The Evolution of Smart Cities 

While urbanization and technology have laid the foundation for smart cities, the COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in 2020 may ultimately shape long-term implementations. 

As a result of social distancing mandates implemented to mitigate disease spread, smart city technologies and services for healthcare, work, education, retail, finance, security, entertainment, food services, mobility, and essentially any other activity requiring human interaction have undergone both acceleration and transformation.

Although the fundamental architecture of smart cities remains centered around an IoT foundation upon which applications are built for defined use cases, the use cases themselves have both evolved and accelerated in their implementation. 

In healthcare alone, activities such as telemedicine, contact tracing, public health messaging, mobility pattern analysis, and robotic patient care have emerged and begun to transform the notion of healthcare delivery from one of in-person interaction to one of digital engagement. 

Likewise, urban transportation is seeing significant changes due to changing social practices resulting from the pandemic and government policies being implemented for pandemic recovery. Digital technologies will play a key role in these changes as efforts to reestablish demand for public transportation increasingly focus on flexible transit scheduling and planning and the development of multimodal digital platforms that integrate public transportation with bikes, scooters, ride-hailing, and other mobility modes. 

In short, even the most established smart cities face the innovation challenge of re-imagining city operations for a new era of heightened concerns for health and resiliency, the latter of which additionally factors into climate change considerations. Similar to the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change is now generally recognized as a globally disruptive and destructive issue that must be mitigated through increased government efforts that include the design, implementation, and operation of smart cities. 

While the noted trend towards increased city intelligence through digitalization affords many opportunities for improving the lives of citizens, it also creates a number of security concerns. 

The rapid growth in digital information collection, storage, and use has opened up multiple new attack surfaces for cyber-terrorism, cyber-warfare, and cyber-crime. While cyber-terrorism and cyber-warfare often have social and political motivations, cyber-crime is tied largely to commercial and economic interests and can impart significant financial costs on victims. Indeed, the financial impact of cyber-crimes is expected to amount to as much as US$6 trillion in 2021 considering damage and destruction of data, stolen money, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement, fraud, post-attack disruption to business operations, forensic investigation, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems and/or reputational harm. 

This considerable cost is expected to rise to as much as US$10.5 trillion by 2025 as the storage of digital data rises in the coming years. The accumulation of digital data has only hastened as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic as the extent of consumer online interactions has been accelerated by three to four years and the extent of business product and service digitalization has been accelerated by six to ten years.  

The rapid, and now accelerated, pace of digital activity places a great burden on smart city infrastructure as operational technologies (OT) and information technologies (IT) converge to offer new services and capabilities. Legacy OT systems that are not secure combined with the proliferation of novel, but insecure, digital devices combine to make cybersecurity and cyber resilience urgent for smart cities. Preservation of the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information in cyberspace coupled with the capacity for rapid recovery from cyber incidents must sit at the top of cyber secure and cyber resilient smart city agendas. 

A Forward-Looking Agenda for Smart Cities  

The sharing of international expertise, technologies, and best practices can play an important role in achieving cyber secure and cyber resilient smart cities. The United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and Israel are three highly urbanized countries that are aligned in their ambitions for innovation and security in the urban context. While each country scores highly in international innovation rankings, Singapore is particularly advanced in smart city technology innovation while Israel is a global leader in cyber security innovation. 

The UAE has rapidly built smart city visibility, particularly related to developments in the emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and has visible initiatives to ensure that these cities are cyber secure and resilient, including the 2020 formation of a Cybersecurity Council headed by a recently appointed government Head of Cyber Security. 

Among emirate level initiatives, Dubai has established a Cyber Security Strategy and in Abu Dhabi, the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC) was formed in 2020 and has set forth a research and development strategy that clearly puts cybersecurity at the forefront by including cryptography, digital security, and secure systems as three of seven top priority research areas for the emirate.  

An agenda for smart city collaboration among the UAE, Singapore and Israel would certainly involve the exchange of best practices regarding legal and regulatory frameworks as well as engagement in technology investment and trade. 

However, ecosystem development is what underpins long-term sustainability and hence international collaboration should further entail targeted initiatives addressing human capital, R&D, and innovation. Human capital development is very important given the growing shortage of skilled cyber security manpower. R&D supports the development of human capital and further brings value to the development of cutting-edge approaches to smart city services, security, and resiliency. 

R&D topics of particular merit within the cyber security context include the protection of edge devices, application of artificial intelligence techniques, application of blockchain, and in the coming years, the implementation of quantum technologies. Innovation further builds on human capital and R&D advances to establish commercially viable new technologies tailored to applications.

On this latter point, R&D and innovation collaboration may focus on specific smart city sectors of common interest and growing importance. Given that both healthcare and transportation are being re-imagined as a result of COVID-19, focused initial collaboration efforts in these domains, for instance, could lead to large rewards for all involved. 

Urbanization and technological trends make the rise of smart cities inevitable. As discussed in this paper, however, smart cities will inherently face threats and challenges. Collaboration among countries that have common interests in securing a successful future for their smart cities can help mitigate these threats. The UAE, Singapore, and Israel are three such countries that can reap the benefits of collaboration through a holistic partnership that addresses human capital, R&D, and innovation while taking into consideration applications with both near and long-term importance. 

The full conference session to which the story relates is available online, here:

Dr. Steve Griffiths is the Senior Vice President of Research and Development and Professor of Practice at Khalifa University. 

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By Dr. Nawaf I. Almoosa

Cities become ‘smart’ only when they offer services that properly take into account the needs of their population and of visitors. City services have to be context-dependent and support the achievement of city-specific goals.

During the third session of the INNOV-Italy UAE Webinar Series, I participated in a webinar that highlighted multi-disciplinary smart city solutions that blend together the socio-cultural and technical aspects of iconic cities like Rome, Milan, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. I was joined by Italian and UAE academia, industries and public institutions to discuss new collaborations as well as novel ideas for new projects.

In one of the sessions, Dr. Steve Griffiths, Senior Vice President for Research and Development at KU, and I covered our perspectives on research and innovation that can support the development and evolution of smart cities and sustainable mobility.

New technologies are enabling cities to become ‘smart.’ ‘Smart cities’ is a concept that has evolved very quickly thanks to the recent advancements in sensors and artificial intelligence technologies that enable analysis of massive data sets. There is no shortage of start-up companies trying to address every sector of smart cities. As Dr. Steve said, on the technology side, clearly there’s a good opportunity for the Internet of Things, high speed communications networks, low-earth orbit satellites providing data and lots of other ways of bringing data to intelligent systems. But a smart city is not just a collection of technologies.

In fact, the notion of a city itself is not always so clear. City definitions differ: in Japan, a city needs 50,000 inhabitants; in Norway, just 200. But cities are very important, no matter how they are defined. 55 percent of the world’s population lives in cities—4.2 billion people—and 80 percent of global GDP is generated in cities. They account for three-quarters of human-caused global carbon dioxide emissions and an estimated two-thirds of global final energy use.

In the UAE’s definition of the smart city, we include the notion of sustainability, which is perhaps the most critical aspect of intelligence. We look at the environment, we look at the economy, and we look at social welfare, bringing numerous opportunities to have impact across a lot of different areas. Healthcare, safety, convenience, environmental quality and social connectedness all factor into the UAE’s vision for smart and sustainable cities.

Additionally, the Khalifa University R&D strategy focuses on all the tenets of the 4th Industrial Revolution, including information and communication technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence and data science, and advanced materials and manufacturing. Like a city, our strategy involves integrating all the different sectors aligned with UAE priorities. The Emirates ICT Innovation Center (EBTIC), of which I am the Acting Director, is one of the key collaborators along with Khalifa University’s other research centers focused on smart and sustainable cities in the UAE. 

EBTIC is built on open innovation and collaboration between academia, industry and government. We function like any academic research center in terms of our research and putting out scientific publications, but we also work closely with government and industry stakeholders in applied research, where we produce different concepts and other value-driven research.

Smart societies, infrastructure and enterprise form the backbone of EBTIC’s research and innovation architecture. Our research teams aim to apply tools from ICT, operations research, data science and artificial intelligence to solve problems in telecommunications infrastructure and to optimize operational efficiency for enterprises. We also use these tools to solve problems in society in general, specifically in areas of sustainability, education, healthcare and social networking.

Academia is crucial in developing a smart city—another aspect of a smart city is having a strong educational system. We have outreach programs to educate professionals in data science and the impact of the technology at a high level and how it can be used in organizations and society in general. Since 2015, we have trained more than 250 professionals in the UAE, with Prof. Ernesto Damiani, Senior Director of the Khalifa University Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute, leading that effort.

The UAE is at the forefront of important work in smart cities, with the smart and sustainable cities of the future the path forwards for smart and sustainable growth.

Innov-Italy UAE aims at improving the opportunities for bilateral cooperation between the UAE and Italy in six high-innovation sectors, including cybersecurity, space, smart cities and sustainable mobility, life sciences, food technologies, and renewable energy.

Dr. Nawaf I. Almoosa is Acting Director of the Emirates ICT Innovation Center (EBTIC) at Khalifa University.

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