With recent advances of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), smart city has been emerged as a new paradigm to dynamically optimize the resources in cities and provide better facilities and quality of life for the citizens. Smart cities involve a variety of components, including ubiquitous sensing devices, heterogeneous networks, large-scale databases, and powerful data centers to collect, transfer, store, and intelligently process real-time information. Smart cities can offer new applications and services for augmenting the daily life of citizens on making decisions, energy consumption, transportation, health-care, and education. Despite the potential vision of smart cities, security and privacy issues remain to be carefully addressed. This paper delineates a comprehensive survey of security and privacy issues of smart cities, and presents a basis for categorizing the present and future developments within this area. It also presents a thematic taxonomy of security and privacy issues of smart cities to highlight the security requirements for designing a secure smart city, identify the existing security and privacy solutions, and present open research issues and challenges of security and privacy in smart cities.

Fog computing has emerged as a promising solution for accommodating the surge of mobile traffic and reducing latency, both known to be inherent problems of cloud computing. Fog services, including computation, storage, and networking, are hosted in the vicinity of end users (edge of the network), and, as a result, reliable access is provisioned to delay-sensitive mobile applications. However, in some cases, the fog computing capacity is overwhelmed by the growing number of demands from patrons, particularly during peak hours, and this can subsequently result in acute performance degradation. In this article, we address this problem by proposing a new concept called fog vehicular computing (FVC) to augment the computation and storage power of fog computing. We also design a comprehensive architecture for FVC and present a number of salient applications. The result of implementation clearly shows the effectiveness of the proposed architecture. Finally, some open issues and envisioned directions are discussed for future research in the context of FVC.

Insecure and portable devices in the smart city’s Internet of Things (IoT) network are increasing at an incredible rate. Various distributed and centralized platforms against cyber attacks have been implemented in recent years, but these platforms are inefficient due to their constrained levels of storage, high energy consumption, the central point of failure, underutilized resources, high latency, etc. In addition, the current architecture confronts the problems of scalability, flexibility, complexity, monitoring, managing and collecting of IoT data, and defend against cyber threats. To address these issues, the authors present a distributed and decentralized blockchain-software-defined networking (SDN)-based energy-aware architecture for IoT in smart cities. Thus, SDN is continuously observing, controlling, and managing IoT devices activities and detects possible attacks in the network; blockchain provides adequate security and privacy against cyber attacks, and reduces the central point of failure issues; network function virtualization (NFV) is used to saving energy, load balancing, as well as increasing the lifetime of the entire network. Also, we introduce a cluster head selection (CHS) algorithm to reduce the energy consumption in the presented model. Finally, we analyze the performance using various parameters (e.g., throughput, response time, gas consumption, and communication overhead) and demonstrate the result that provides higher throughput, lower response time, and lower gas consumption than existing works for smart cities.