Digital Forensics and the Smart City: An Overview

The abundance of networked technologies running critical aspects of a city, down to the level of individual citizens, make the systems of a smart city particularly tempting targets for threat actors such as criminals and advanced persistent threats (APTs), among others [1,2]. Additionally, the diversity of the technologies and sheer number of devices that may be utilized by any given smart city means that there will be a great deal of complexity involved in securing the smart city’s systems and networks and for obtaining evidence for digital forensic purposes. Once explored, however, those complexities may turn out to be opportunities. For example, if a smart city has an intelligent traffic management system, the devices enabling it could hold data that could be useful as digital evidence [1,2]. 

Jurisdictional issues may also arise because of how municipalities or departments implement a technology, or if cloud technology that is based in another region is utilized. For example, a city in one country may utilize a cloud service based in a different country to maintain data related to a given city service; this poses a potential barrier to digital evidence acquisition as cybersecurity personnel may find themselves having to navigate the legal systems of both jurisdictions to access the data [1,3].

The fact that smart cities are very heavily built on IoT devices means that IoT considerations will almost certainly be smart city considerations as well. For example, smart buildings can be one aspect of a smart city and are enabled using IoT devices such as sensors and remote controls connected wirelessly to one another; any number of factors involved with these devices, such as the level of encryption on a given device, the validity or lifespan of stored data, or the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the data, can prove a hinderance to evidence collection if such devices are utilized by a threat actor [3].