Privacy and Trust in Smart Cities

Dear Colleagues,

The world is currently experiencing a rapid growth of connected components, both in the physical space and in cyberspace, due to the ubiquitous nature of the Internet of Things (IoT). These connected components utilise advancements in hardware, software and modern networking technologies. The smart city concept aims to move from the IoT towards the Internet of Everything (IoE), which is a multi-domain environment that integrates a huge number of devices and services aiming to provide an improved quality of life to residents. Components of smart cities capitalize on distributed sensing through heterogeneous networks, data acquisition and information processing, as well as the state-of-the-art technologies (6G, Web3, network function virtualisation, software-defined networking etc.). However, challenges regarding privacy and trust around these frontier technologies are still neither well understood, nor addressed. Valuable data generated from billions of connected things lead to the risk of a variety of privacy breaches that must be prevented and mitigated. On the one hand, technologies need to be developed to cater to the privacy and trust requirements of smart cities. On the other hand, it is vital that these technologies are compliant with the data protection laws and regulations of various jurisdictions. Privacy and trust challenges not only impact various services of smart cities (e.g., healthcare, environment, utilities and transportation), but also the infrastructure established and maintained for these services. Thus, it is essential to address the privacy and trust challenges in smart cities through scalable, robust, and reliable solutions.

This Special Issue aims to bring together original research papers, review articles and case studies from academic and industrial researchers highlighting privacy and trust in smart cities.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Privacy-preserving/enhancing technologies for smart cities;
• Privacy-as-a-service, trust-as-a-service;
• Blockchain-based privacy and trust in smart cities;
• Privacy and trust for big data analytics in smart cities;
• Privacy and trust in intelligent transportation systems for smart cities;
• Privacy in network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined network (SDN) for smart cities;

• Secure communications and autonomous radios in smart cities;
• Privacy and trust in crowd sensing/crowdsourcing in smart cities;
• Privacy and trust for smart city data storage and sharing;
• Future privacy challenges for smart cities;
• Human factors, usability, and user-centred design of privacy technologies for smart cities.

Dr. M Shahriar Rahman
Dr. Anirban Basu
Guest Editors

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