SCKPISec: A KPI-Guided Model-Based Approach to Realize Security by Design for Smart City Systems

This paper focuses on security by design for smart city systems. Insecure smart city systems may cause serious losses to the social, environmental and economic development of smart cities. Therefore, it is essential to ensure security by design for smart city systems. For large-scale, hyper-connected smart city systems consisting of a large number of interconnected devices of different types, analyzing the impact of security threats on the whole system as well as the various aspects of smart cities at the early design stage of the system is an important and difficult problem that remains unsolved. To address this problem, this paper proposes a KPI-guided model-based approach and accompanying prototype tool, named SCKPISec (Smart City KPI-guided Security). By applying the techniques of UML modeling, formal modeling and verification, and KPIs evaluation, SCKPISec provides an effective way to realize KPI-guided security by design for smart city systems. We evaluated SCKPISec through case studies. The results show that SCKPISec can efficiently detect the potential problems of smart city systems under security threats and has high feasibility and applicability in ensuring KPI-guided security by design for smart city systems. Compared with existing model-based security approaches, the advantage of SCKPISec is that it has a highly automated verification process and provides an effective and efficient solution to evaluate the potential KPI losses of smart cities under security threats at the early design stage of smart city systems.