Toward a Privacy-Preserving and Secure Smart City: Recent Advances in User-Centric Applications
Mohammad Rasool Momeni, Abdollah Jabbari, Carol Fung, Raouf Boutaba · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2025
The ever-increasing global population has caused rapid urbanization in recent decades. Many cities around the world are trying to leverage information and communication technologies to resolve the resulting problems, such as traffic congestion and high energy consumption. This trend is part of the movement towards the development of the so-called smart cities that provide efficient, comfortable, and happy lives to their residents. In this respect, smart cities are indeed promising but have significant underlying complexity due to the number of variety of domains involved, including living, economy, mobility, governance, etc. However, in recent years, numerous cyber attacks and privacy leaks have been major obstacles to the widespread adoption and deployment of smart city applications. In general, smart city domains can be classified into user-centric applications and non-user-centric applications, such as critical infrastructures. This paper examines the key security and privacy challenges associated with recently trending user-centric smart city applications. First, we study the leading technologies along with superior security methods and privacy-enhancing technologies in smart cities. We also provide a critical survey of the security and privacy of novel user-centric smart city applications, namely smart parking, smart charging, and smart home. Our survey provides a detailed review of recent, relevant, and state-of-the-art research works to assist readers in gaining a comprehensive understanding of security and privacy challenges associated with smart cities. Finally, it outlines some research directions worth investigating in the future. The ultimate goal of this survey is to shed light on the pressing security and privacy challenges in smart cities and to provide insights for the development of secure and privacy-preserving smart cities.