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Trust Privacy and Security for Future Sustainable Smart Cities

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Urban and Rural Development".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2023) | Viewed by 11126

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Howard University, Washington, DC 20059, USA
Interests: cybersecurity; trust computing; green computing

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Guest Editor
Informatics Building School of Informatics, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK
Interests: deep learning; artificial intelligence; machine learning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Institute of Applied Informatics, Department of Computer Science, University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
Interests: artificial intelligence; next-generation IoT systems; wireless sensor networks; cognitive radio; signal processing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are on the onset of a new era of global transformation, in which residents and their surrounding environments are increasingly connected through rapidly changing intelligent technologies. This transformation offers great promise for improved wellbeing and prosperity but poses significant challenges at the complex intersection of technology and society.

Future smart connected cities, in turn, aim to synergistically integrate intelligent technologies with the natural and built environments, including infrastructure, to improve the social and economic wellbeing of those who live, work, or travel within it. Future Smart Cities have been prevalent in modern critical infrastructures, including power generation and manufacturing plants, transportation, healthcare, etc., and security, as well as the trustworthiness of such systems, have become crucial. Furthermore, the IoT-based smart city paradigm is considered to follow the latest wave of world information technology after the computer and the Internet. With the proliferation of techniques in the smart city paradigm, many challenges emerge in achieving trust privacy and security in the context of the smart city paradigm. 

This SI aims to bring together researchers from academia, industry, and government agencies to understand the innovative technologies to achieve security and trust privacy in future smart cities. Submitted papers are expected to cover solutions using state-of-the-art and novel approaches for the smart city related to cost-effectiveness, security, and sustainability problems as well as challenges.

Dr. Pushpita Chatterjee
Prof. Dr. Yudong Zhang
Dr. Amrit Mukherjee
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • trust
  • security
  • privacy
  • blockchain
  • IoT
  • smart city
  • machine learning

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Editorial

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3 pages, 192 KiB  
Editorial
Trust, Privacy and Security for Smart Cities
by Yudong Zhang, Pushpita Chatterjee and Amrit Mukherjee
Sustainability 2023, 15(6), 5523; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15065523 - 21 Mar 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1820
Abstract
The world is currently at the dawn of a new era characterized by a global transformation reshaping how we interact with our surroundings and each other [...] Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trust Privacy and Security for Future Sustainable Smart Cities)

Research

Jump to: Editorial

15 pages, 446 KiB  
Article
Improved End-to-End Data Security Approach for Cloud Computing
by Soumalya Ghosh, Shiv Kumar Verma, Uttam Ghosh and Mohammed Al-Numay
Sustainability 2023, 15(22), 16010; https://doi.org/10.3390/su152216010 - 16 Nov 2023
Viewed by 1058
Abstract
Cloud computing is one of the major cutting-edge technologies that is growing at a gigantic rate to redefine computation through service-oriented computing. It has addressed the issue of owning and managing computational infrastructure by providing service through a pay-and-use model. However, a major [...] Read more.
Cloud computing is one of the major cutting-edge technologies that is growing at a gigantic rate to redefine computation through service-oriented computing. It has addressed the issue of owning and managing computational infrastructure by providing service through a pay-and-use model. However, a major possible hindrance is security breaches, especially when the sender uploads or the receiver downloads the data from a remotely accessed server. It is a very generic approach to ensuring data security through different encryption techniques, but it might not be able to maintain the security standard. This paper proposes an end-to-end data security approach from the sender side to the receiver side by adding extra padding sequences, as well as randomized salting, followed by hashing and an encryption technique. The effectiveness of the proposed method was established using both a simulated system and mathematical formulations with different performance metrics. Furthermore, its performance was compared with those of contemporary algorithms, showing that the proposed algorithm creates a larger ciphertext that is almost impossible to crack due to randomization modules. However, it has significantly longer encryption and decryption times, although our primary concern is ensuring security, not reducing time. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trust Privacy and Security for Future Sustainable Smart Cities)
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19 pages, 3440 KiB  
Article
Blockchain-Enabled Communication Framework for Secure and Trustworthy Internet of Vehicles
by Manju Biswas, Debashis Das, Sourav Banerjee, Amrit Mukherjee, Waleed AL-Numay, Utpal Biswas and Yudong Zhang
Sustainability 2023, 15(12), 9399; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15129399 - 12 Jun 2023
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2946
Abstract
The emerging field of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has garnered significant attention due to its potential to revolutionize transportation and mobility. IoV enables the development of innovative services and applications that can enhance the efficiency, safety, and sustainability of transportation systems. However, [...] Read more.
The emerging field of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has garnered significant attention due to its potential to revolutionize transportation and mobility. IoV enables the development of innovative services and applications that can enhance the efficiency, safety, and sustainability of transportation systems. However, ensuring secure and reliable communication among different components of an IoV system poses a critical challenge. This study proposes a blockchain-based communication framework for secure and trustworthy IoV applications. The framework utilizes blockchain technology’s decentralization and security features to create secure communication channels between IoV system components, including vehicles, infrastructure, and service providers. An identity management system is also integrated into the framework to authenticate and authorize users and devices, thereby preventing unauthorized access and data breaches. To assess the proposed framework’s effectiveness, real-world IoV scenarios were used to conduct experiments, and the results demonstrate that the framework can provide secure and trustworthy communication for IoV applications. The proposed blockchain-enabled communication framework provides a promising solution for addressing security and trust challenges in IoV communication systems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trust Privacy and Security for Future Sustainable Smart Cities)
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21 pages, 1010 KiB  
Article
A Residual Resource Fitness-Based Genetic Algorithm for a Fog-Level Virtual Machine Placement for Green Smart City Services
by Sanjoy Choudhury, Ashish Kumar Luhach, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues, Mohammed AL-Numay, Uttam Ghosh and Diptendu Sinha Roy
Sustainability 2023, 15(11), 8918; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15118918 - 1 Jun 2023
Viewed by 1386
Abstract
Energy efficient information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure at all levels of a city’s edifice constitutes a core requirement within the sustainable development goals. The ICT infrastructure of smart cities can be considered in three levels, namely the cloud layer infrastructure, devices/sensing layer [...] Read more.
Energy efficient information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure at all levels of a city’s edifice constitutes a core requirement within the sustainable development goals. The ICT infrastructure of smart cities can be considered in three levels, namely the cloud layer infrastructure, devices/sensing layer infrastructure, and fog layer infrastructure at the edge of the network. Efficiency of a data-centre’s energy infrastructure is significantly affected by the placement of virtual machines (VMs) within the data-centre facility. This research establishes the virtual machine (VM) placement problem as an optimisation problem, and due to its adaptability for such complicated search issues, this paper applies the genetic algorithm (GA) towards the VM placement problem solution. When allocating or reallocating a VM, there is a large quantity of unused resources that might be used, however these resources are inefficiently spread over several different active physical machines (PMs). This study aims to increase the data-centre’s efficiency in terms of both energy usage and time spent on maintenance, and introduces a novel fitness function to streamline the process of computing the fitness function in GAs, which is the most computationally intensive component in a GA. A standard GA and first fit decreasing GA (FFD-GA) are applied on benchmark datasets to compare their relative performances. Experimental results obtained using data from Google data-centres demonstrate that the proposed FFD-GA saves around 8% more energy than a standard GA while reducing the computational overhead by approximately 66%. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trust Privacy and Security for Future Sustainable Smart Cities)
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20 pages, 17625 KiB  
Article
Design and Development of a Fog-Assisted Elephant Corridor over a Railway Track
by Manash Kumar Mondal, Riman Mandal, Sourav Banerjee, Utpal Biswas, Jerry Chun-Wei Lin, Osama Alfarraj and Amr Tolba
Sustainability 2023, 15(7), 5944; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15075944 - 29 Mar 2023
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 2744
Abstract
Elephants are one of the largest animals on earth and are found in forests, grasslands and savannahs in the tropical and subtropical regions of Asia and Africa. A country like India, especially the northeastern region, is covered by deep forests and is home [...] Read more.
Elephants are one of the largest animals on earth and are found in forests, grasslands and savannahs in the tropical and subtropical regions of Asia and Africa. A country like India, especially the northeastern region, is covered by deep forests and is home to many elephants. Railroads are an effective and inexpensive means of transporting goods and passengers in this region. Due to poor visibility in the forests, collisions between trains and elephants are increasing day by day. In the last ten years, more than 190 elephants died due to train accidents. The most effective solution to this collision problem is to stop the train immediately. To address this sensitive issue, a solution is needed to detect and monitor elephants near railroad tracks and analyze data from the camera trap near the intersection of elephant corridors and railroad tracks. In this paper, we have developed a fog computing-based framework that not only detects and monitors the elephants but also improves the latency, network utilization and execution time. The fog-enabled elephant monitoring system informs the train control system of the existence of elephants in the corridor and a warning light LED flashes near the train tracks. This system is deployed and simulated in the iFogSim simulator and shows improvements in latency, network utilization, and execution time compared to cloud-based infrastructures. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trust Privacy and Security for Future Sustainable Smart Cities)
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