VAR Panchayat

Smarter ways to secure Smart Cities?

by VARINDIA 2017-04-05

Today’s encryption mechanisms are very complex and need heavy computation power to be successful

The global population is growing fast and will reach about 9 billion by 2050. Most of this populace is moving towards cities from villages and small towns. This is urbanization at a scale that has not been experienced before and owing to this huge flux, many operations in a typical city will have to be automated and made smart. These operations are related to traffic regulation, utility meter reading, smart terminals for various services, etc. Obviously, these units which we might call as smart nodes are connected to the Internet, but these nodes possess lesser computing power than bigger computers and hence are vulnerable to malicious attacks. Many attacks have already happened in the near past, where smart lights from a leading manufacturer and a few CCTV cameras were also compromised. What is the solution for these vulnerabilities? There cannot be one but multiple solutions which are articulated below.

Why are smart city systems vulnerable?

We have seen that the smart nodes in a smart city system are vulnerable to malicious acts. Quite naturally, some might wonder why these modes are vulnerable when their counterparts and computers in other domains are relatively secure. The simple reason is encryption, or lack of proper encryption. Encryption, in cryptographic terms, is to alter and send data in a manner, which will make it very difficult for anybody eavesdropping on the channel to decrypt and know what is being sent. If the encryption is not strong enough, it will be relatively easy to get access to the systems through any number of channels and eventually access and control them. Today’s encryption mechanisms are very complex and need heavy computation power to be successful.

Why aren’t encryption mechanisms secure in spite of being complex?

Encryption in nodes of smart city systems are strong enough to repel malicious attacks. One reason is why the encryption is not strong enough is because the nodes in smart city systems are not computationally powerful. Encryption is a mathematically complex process which needs relatively higher computation power to calculate the encryption result. This, at the present level of technology, is difficult to achieve at the node level, since these nodes are controlled by computers which are very low power, at times with only KBs of RAM. This makes it highly difficult to encrypt data in an interval of time which is not considered to be high latency.

For example, in the web, a technology or protocol called TLS is followed to encrypt and decrypt messages between a web browser and a web server. The TLS is a complex protocol on the top of another protocol called TCP, both of which are highly complex and cannot be supported with less-powerful microcontrollers and microprocessors. The end-result is tweaking the encryption mechanism in such a way that it becomes computationally less expensive and more vulnerable.

What is the key to making encryption stronger?

One way in which the end nodes of smart city systems can be made stronger is to make them computationally powerful. But that is a double-edged sword. Computationally powerful nodes will consume more power and these nodes have to sometimes run on batteries or from limited power. Hence, there has to be some other mechanism through which the encryption has to be made stronger by using technologies other than TLS/ TCP combination. Or, it could even be a different physical communication interface such as light which allows only a strict line of sight operations making eavesdropping nearly impossible? One another method is to generate keys for encryption in a manner which is completely and truly random as in a natural process to strengthen the generation and re-generation of keys. This can be done in a more economical manner, since the nodes of the smart city systems have access to light and other environmental factors which are truly random.

Whichever protocol is adopted for securing the nodes of the smart city systems, there is no way to ensure that they are all safe from malicious attacks, since people with malicious intents are seeking more and more innovative ways to attack the modern way of life.

However, with computationally strong nodes as the base of a smart city system, we can imagine a new urban reality that is safe and secure so that we can live peacefully while all our connected devices communicate intelligently with each other.