An Overview of Cyber Threats, Attacks and Countermeasures on the Primary Domains of Smart Cities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper provides a wide overview of the cyber threats, attacks, and countermeasures on the several defined primary domains of Smart Cities. It is based on a significant literature review to address the cyber threats and attacks in smart government, mobility, environment, living, healthcare, economy and people.   

The paper should be carefully revised for writing style and grammar (use second person in some sentences which is not a good writing practice, some typos should be removed and some sentences need revision). The authors should be careful in referencing the papers (the place of the reference in the text is important). For example, “In this direction, the authors of this article..” should be followed by the reference number (it is [22]), as otherwise, it gives the impression that the authors of this paper are the ones that proposed the discussed block chain solution.  

Following the introductory part, the authors discuss each of the domains referencing literature and practices. Although the text is readable, it would be good to restructure it to the possible extent to capture 1) possible treats and the reasons they appear; 2) attack descriptions (if applicable and available in literature) and 3) countermeasures. Although these aspects are included for each of the discussed domains, the reader would be able to follow the text easier if as certain structure is applied. The paper lacks at least general recommendations and conclusions based on the reviewed literature. This should be added to increase the value of the extensive review work that has been done.

Author Response

Dear respected Editor and Reviewers,

We deeply appreciate your time and effort in reviewing our manuscript. Your comments are very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have revised the manuscript considering all the insightful comments to enhance the paper's readability. We believe these changes have strengthened the rationale and importance of our study.

Yours sincerely,

Vasiliki Demertzi, Stavros Demertzis and Konstantinos Demertzis

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The article addressed the smart environment cyber threads and it's implications under various scenarios. 

The organisation of the article is appreciated.

Various smart environment issues and approach to Classify the security issues are illustrated with respect to various conference and very few journals.

It's recommended to incorporate recent journals related to the same issue and it's inference to current scenarios.

Author Response

Dear respected Editor and Reviewers,

We deeply appreciate your time and effort in reviewing our manuscript. Your comments are very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have revised the manuscript considering all the insightful comments to enhance the paper's readability. We believe these changes have strengthened the rationale and importance of our study.

Yours sincerely,

Vasiliki Demertzi, Stavros Demertzis and Konstantinos Demertzis

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have not gone into too much depth about actual cyber threats, attacks and countermeasures, even though the title seems to suggest this. The scope of the article is too broad. 

Author Response

Dear respected Editor and Reviewers,

We deeply appreciate your time and effort in reviewing our manuscript. Your comments are very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have revised the manuscript considering all the insightful comments to enhance the paper's readability. We believe these changes have strengthened the rationale and importance of our study.

Yours sincerely,

Vasiliki Demertzi, Stavros Demertzis and Konstantinos Demertzis

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

In this paper, discussed the growth of smart city concept, their security issues. With rapid growth of technology involved and the implementation of the smart city concept, it is becoming vital to identify and implement security controls for their secure operation. Smart city security is essential for a city to incorporate the technologies into smart city cyber infrastructure and to improve the conditions of life for its citizens.

Paper title and Paper content mixture of various technologies, smart cities, and the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) exposes a wide range of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by cyber criminals and other malicious actors. There are an unknown number of potential vulnerabilities and methodologies, some of the most common attacks do not include:

·         Man-in-the-middle

·         Data and identity theft

·         Device hijacking

·         Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

·         Permanent Denial of Service (PDoS)

Therefore, in order to respond to the enthusiastic acceptance of global smart city technologies, cyber security must develop in same direction. This paper is survey and discus on explanation of cyber security, smart cities, and survey of available relevant literature on security in that technology.

The research in this study showed that meeting these challenges depends on the hard work of governments, developers of equipment and software and companies providing IT security services.

The smart city is still in its infancy, and there are still many policies, architectures, plans and technical solutions in this important field. A review of this paper the research literature in the field of smart cities found that some studies have provided useful guidance for policymakers and city managers who sought to better define and implement smart city strategies and operational plans.

In this paper,   discussed  several security threats associated with the smart city and some of the potential solutions and the recommendation for the future work to secure the smart city from a cyber security perspective. Give positive feedback first, briefly summarize what the paper is about and what the findings are. Try to put the findings of the paper into the context of the existing literature and current knowledge. Indicate the significance of the work and if it is novel or mainly confirmatory.

Author Response

Dear respected Editor and Reviewers,

We deeply appreciate your time and effort in reviewing our manuscript. Your comments are very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have revised the manuscript considering all the insightful comments to enhance the paper's readability. We believe these changes have strengthened the rationale and importance of our study.

Yours sincerely,

Vasiliki Demertzi, Stavros Demertzis and Konstantinos Demertzis

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 5 Report

 In this article, authors present an overview of cyber threats, attacks, and countermeasures on the primary domains of smart cities (smart government, smart mobility, smart environment, smart living, smart healthcare, smart economy, and smart people).

The reviewer has some concerns.

·       In the abstract, the result of this review must be described briefly.

·       The organization of the paper needs some modifications. Please focus on the matter to increase the comprehensibility.

·   The paper is poorly presented and does not attract the attention of readers (lack of illustrations and tables)

·       The related work section may also be called a literature review. The point of the section is to highlight work done by others that somehow ties in with your own work. It may be work that you're basing your work off of, or work that shows others attempts to solve the same problem. You should present the previous works separately in section 2.

·    The contribution of the work is not clear. The study is appreciated, but lacks significant outcomes. I suggest authors to add a comparative study of attacks and cyber threats to improve the comprehensibility of paper

·  Please improve the reference format and verify the number of each reference cited in the paper

Author Response

Dear respected Editor and Reviewers,

We deeply appreciate your time and effort in reviewing our manuscript. Your comments are very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have revised the manuscript considering all the insightful comments to enhance the paper's readability. We believe these changes have strengthened the rationale and importance of our study.

Yours sincerely,

Vasiliki Demertzi, Stavros Demertzis and Konstantinos Demertzis

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 6 Report

This paper reviews smart cities' cyber threats, attacks, and countermeasures on the 7 primary domains of smart cities. It's very comprehensive. In my opinion, there are the following comments to improve this paper:

1. Some acronyms should be given their full name when they first appear, such as ICT.

2. There are some spelling mistakes. For example, Line 731.

3. Appropriate increase of figures or tables to improve the readability of the paper.

4. I suggest sorting out the contents under the seven main topics in the second part and adding three levels of headings. This will help the reader to grasp the context of the paper.

Author Response

Dear respected Editor and Reviewers,

We deeply appreciate your time and effort in reviewing our manuscript. Your comments are very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have revised the manuscript considering all the insightful comments to enhance the paper's readability. We believe these changes have strengthened the rationale and importance of our study.

Yours sincerely,

Vasiliki Demertzi, Stavros Demertzis and Konstantinos Demertzis

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 7 Report

The article "An Overview of Cyber Threats, Attacks, and Countermeasures on the Primary Domains of Smart Cities" presents the study about the domains that a smart city should include. Also, the authors identify the cyber threats and attacks that can occur in each domain and the countermeasures that they suggest for decision makers. The article presents an extensive study of the related works of the different domains of a smart city (smart government, smart mobility, smart environment, smart life, smart healthcare, smart economy and smart people), the references used throughout the article are very relevant and current in this study.

However, some aspects that authors should consider to improve the quality of the article are:

1) the article lacks a common thread in several of its sections. This can cause the reader to lose interest in reading some sections.

For example, several topics are addressed in the introduction: smart city, the role of ICT, smart city with a participatory approach, what a smart city guarantees, what a smart city is not, urban planners, smart city as a vision for urban development, etc. etc.

Several topics are addressed in the same section, and the common thread of the arguments presented is not perceived.

The authors should make a better abstraction of the topics addressed in the introduction.

2) the abstraction problem discussed in the introduction is repeated in other sections.

For example, the sections where each domain is detailed, the authors should (i) carry out a structure where they comment on how they are classifying each topic and (ii) how they are evaluating it. In addition to (iii) describe the entire problem domain, (iv) which topic will be addressed as an example.

3) the information presented in each of the domains presented (Section 2) can be organized by making a structure that is repeated in each of the domains.

For example, in the intelligent government section the desirable characteristics are listed, but the threats are no longer perceived in which characteristics are found. 

4) Each section should explicitly show the description of the domain, detail the indicators of greatest impact in each domain, the cyber threats it faces, the attacks, the countermeasures, and to specify an example.

5) To increase the scientific soundness of this research. A lesson learned section for each of the domains should be added to this article.

6) The article does not show a study of the state of the art, which allows identifying the contribution of the article in the context of the field; as well as to evaluate the contribution of the article with respect to the area of knowledge.

7) The meaning of the acronym ICT is not detailed before use.

8) the use of acronyms such as ISACA, COBIT, ITSM does not correspond to the initials used.

9) the statement is confusing: 55555/city/company for the company and 55555/users/manager for the Manager or the company representative

Author Response

Dear respected Editor and Reviewers,

We deeply appreciate your time and effort in reviewing our manuscript. Your comments are very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have revised the manuscript considering all the insightful comments to enhance the paper's readability. We believe these changes have strengthened the rationale and importance of our study.

Yours sincerely,

Vasiliki Demertzi, Stavros Demertzis and Konstantinos Demertzis

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

The reviewer thanks the author for addressing my concern and incorporating necessary changes in the revised version

No more comments

Author Response

We want to express our sincere appreciation for your insightful comments and constructive suggestions, which have significantly helped us to improve the manuscript. 

Reviewer 5 Report

The authors have responded satisfactorily to all the reviewer’s concerns. They have made a large number of significant modifications to their paper to improve its quality: adding the suggested modifications in abstract, introduction and related work, improving the paper structure to make it more understandable, add illustrations, improving the recommendation, enhancing conclusion and future works section. The reviewer has some minor concerns.

·       Some sentences are too long to make readers confused, and there are also some typos and grammar errors in this paper.

·       Correct the title of section 3  “Recommendations”

·       The quality of all figures and tables should be improved.

·   Please improve the reference format and verify the number of each reference cited in the paper

Author Response

Dear respected Reviewer,

We deeply appreciate your time and effort in reviewing our manuscript. Your comments are very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have revised the manuscript considering all the insightful comments to enhance the paper's readability. We believe these changes have strengthened the rationale and importance of our study.

Yours sincerely,

Vasiliki Demertzi, Stavros Demertzis and Konstantinos Demertzis

Reviewer 5

The authors have responded satisfactorily to all the reviewer’s concerns. They have made a large number of significant modifications to their paper to improve its quality: adding the suggested modifications in abstract, introduction and related work, improving the paper structure to make it more understandable, add illustrations, improving the recommendation, enhancing conclusion and future works section. The reviewer has some minor concerns.

1. Some sentences are too long to make readers confused, and there are also some typos and grammar errors in this paper.

ANS-1: Thank you for this constructive comment. We have revised the manuscript considering the helpful comments to improve the paper's readability.

2. Correct the title of section 3 “Recommendations”

ANS-2: Thank you for this constructive comment. We have revised the title of section 3  as “Recommendations”.

3. The quality of all figures and tables should be improved.

ANS-3: Thank you for your insightful feedback. We enhanced all figures in 300 dpi to increase the paper's readability.

4. Please improve the reference format and verify the number of each reference cited in the paper

ANS-4: Based on the journal format, we examined and refined the reference style. We also double-checked the number of references referenced in the study. Thank you for your input.

Reviewer 7 Report

The authors have taken into account the observations made to the article, have restructured the sections and have added information that helps to improve the understanding of the article. However, some aspects that the authors failed to improve in this article are the following:

* It is difficult to determine the thread of the article. It is necessary to present the problem and the solution in a more concrete way. It is necessary to reduce the level of abstraction of the information presented in the article. The authors only achieved this in the introduction, it is necessary to review each of the sections of the Literature Review.

** The article is too long, the authors must work to eliminate those paragraphs that do not provide such relevant information and that can only make the reader lose interest.

These observations can be solved by reducing the length of the article and concentrating on the central theme of each section.
The subject addressed in this article is too extensive a topic. Therefore, it is impossible to cover all aspects of each category analyzed.

The added figures may help in understanding the document, however, they are not referenced in the text, nor is there a description of the figures, so the objective of each figure in the context of the article is not clear.

Author Response

Dear respected Reviewer,

We deeply appreciate your time and effort in reviewing our manuscript. Your comments are very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have revised the manuscript considering all the insightful comments to enhance the paper's readability. We believe these changes have strengthened the rationale and importance of our study.

Yours sincerely,

Vasiliki Demertzi, Stavros Demertzis and Konstantinos Demertzis

Reviewer 7

The authors have taken into account the observations made to the article, have restructured the sections and have added information that helps to improve the understanding of the article. However, some aspects that the authors failed to improve in this article are the following:

1. It is difficult to determine the thread of the article. It is necessary to present the problem and the solution in a more concrete way. It is necessary to reduce the level of abstraction of the information presented in the article. The authors only achieved this in the introduction, it is necessary to review each of the sections of the Literature Review.

ANS-1: Thank you for this constructive comment. We have revised the manuscript according your suggestions. We have revised the manuscript to reduce its length and made some substantial modifications to concentrate on the central theme of each section. It must be noted that this is the 2nd round review, which revised the manuscript according to more than 90 comments from 7 reviewers. We need to respect all helpful comments without eliminating them.

2. ** The article is too long, the authors must work to eliminate those paragraphs that do not provide such relevant information and that can only make the reader lose interest.

ANS-2: Thank you for your insightful feedback. We have revised the manuscript considering the helpful comments to improve the paper's readability.

3. These observations can be solved by reducing the length of the article and concentrating on the central theme of each section.

ANS-3: Thank you for this helpful comment. We have revised the manuscript to reduce its length and made some substantial modifications to concentrate on the central theme of each section. It must be noted that this is the 2nd round review, which revised the manuscript according to more than 90 comments from 7 reviewers. We need to respect all helpful comments without eliminating them.

4. The subject addressed in this article is too extensive a topic. Therefore, it is impossible to cover all aspects of each category analyzed.

ANS-4: Thank you for your suggestions. This research study is part of more extensive and long-term research published in stages. The second phase will deep into each smart city domain, presenting the sophisticated cyber threats, attacks and countermeasures in more technical detail. This is an overview article, and we aim to be a wide technical range to provide lasting value for the specific knowledge domain. We aim to give the readers a spherical overview of all fields of interest.

5. The added figures may help in understanding the document, however, they are not referenced in the text, nor is there a description of the figures, so the objective of each figure in the context of the article is not clear.

ANS-5: Thank you for your insightful feedback. We have referenced all figures in the text, added description on the figures and enhanced all figures in 300 dpi to increase the paper's readability.