Identity Management: The Security First Approach To Smart Cities

Smart cities are no longer a futuristic theory. Its a practical model that governments today are embracing all over the world.

- Biju Varghese

A smart city is built on the concept of ‘Internet of Things’, which is simply interconnected devices (Street lamps, Traffic lamps, Healthcare, logistics etc.) that make the city smarter. As human beings, our identities are what makes us unique to each other. The same notion today applies to a smart city. With an estimate of 25 Billion connected devices to surface by 2020, smart city planners today are facing something similar to an identity crisis!

All about connecting things

Until now, IoT has been all about connectivity i.e. making one device talk to another. The ways in which IoT devices talk to each other changes from project to project – from wifi, 4G LTE, LoRA, and other such communication methodologies – but the devices themselves remain relatively dumb. Hackers are getting bolder and more coordinated, and this industrialization is putting businesses on the defensive against a growing group of adversaries that steal information for profit. So great were the rewards in our quest for connectivity and communication among devices that we have overlooked in our rush, identifying which devices were communicating with each other, from where they originated, and with what level of assurance.

Identity - a critical component in the quest of making smart cities safe