E-government is an indispensable part of a Smart City. Information and communication technologies transform the relationship between citizens, businesses, and government departments, which enables the implementation of e-government, making operational processes efficient and speedy. This chapter investigates the current deployment strategies and the technological solutions of e-government in terms of security and privacy in a Smart City environment; it also identifies the challenges of adoption. In addition, this chapter proposes a decentralized framework based upon blockchain and artificial intelligence to provide a secure and privacy-preserving infrastructure. The proposed framework integrates technologies to provide mutual trust between individuals, businesses, and governments, leading to a greater transparency of activity and less operational overhead. The reduction in process overhead results in lower running costs (therefore increasing revenue) and improves the speed of cross-boundary transactions.

Privacy and Security Aspects of E-government in Smart Cities

The popularity of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is increasing in critical infrastructure, smart metering, and home automation. Of the numerous protocols available, Z-Wave has significant potential for growth in WSNs. As a proprietary protocol, there are few research publications concerning Z-Wave, and thus little is known about the security implications of its use. Z-Wave networks use a gateway controller to manage and control all devices. Vulnerabilities have been discovered in Z-Wave gateways, all of which rely on the gateway to be consistently connected to the Internet. The work herein introduces a new vulnerability that allows the injection of a rogue controller into the network. Once injected, the rogue controller maintains a stealthy, persistent communication channel with all inadequately defended devices. The severity of this type of attack warrants mitigation steps, presented herein.

Rogue Z-Wave controllers: A persistent attack channel

This paper discusses current threats in wireless networks and some academia research reviews regarding the matters. Significant and persistent threats discussed are sniffing, Man In the Middle Attack (MITM), Rogue Access Points (RAP), Denial Of Services (DoS) and social engineering attacks. Some current developments of wireless communication technology such as short range communication, cloud computing, bring your own device policy (BYOD), devices tethering and convergences of WiFi and cellular network technology are also presented. Some practical suggestion and advanced countermeasures are also reviewed in this paper. The findings from reviewing these research papers proved that the complexity of the attacks had increased by time and the attacks in WiFi network are passive and more dangerous to the end users.

Wireless networks: developments, threats and countermeasures

Wireless LANs are everywhere these days from home to large enterprise corporate networks due to the ease of installation, employee convenience, avoiding wiring cost and constant mobility support. However, the greater availability of wireless LANs means increased danger from attacks and increased challenges to an organisation, IT staff and IT security professionals. This paper discusses the various security issues and vulnerabilities related to the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN encryption standard and common threats/attacks pertaining to the home and enterprise Wireless LAN system and provide overall guidelines and recommendation to the home users and organizations.

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Wireless LAN Security Threats & Vulnerabilities

Computer networks are complex - they are a heterogeneous environment in which numerous services, such as electronic mail, web browsing, voice and multimedia data, traverse the globe daily. The needs and demands of end users continuously change, and to meet these, new technologies are being incorporated into this mega digital infrastructure at a phenomenal rate. In addition to ensuring that necessary functionalities are provided, it is vitally important to ensure that network performance is always at its optimum.

Fundamentally, networks are an environment where data, mostly in the form of TCP and UDP, are being propagated end-to-end between the sending and receiving nodes. There are numerous avenues of network performance that can be exploited in order to improve its performance. Research in this area is multi-faceted, and in this thesis the focus is on evaluating the behaviour of TCP and UDP end-to-end on networks in three scenarios, namely, networks with transition mechanisms, wireless based networks, and in the context of using virtual private network technologies as security protocols.

This thesis will give insights into the behaviour of common protocols on real networks. Therefore, performance metrics related to networks have been gathered from test-bed implementations. The collected data has been presented in graphs and heat maps, which have been evaluated to ascertain network related characteristics. In particular, key metrics have been identified, networking techniques within each context have been ranked, specific observations related to each network environment have been made, and finally, the impact of either version of the Internet Protocol or an operating system has been evaluated.

Improving network performance : an evaluation of TCP/UDP on networks

Wireless Local Area Networks frequently referred to as WLANs or Wi-Fi networks are all the vehemence in recent times. People are installing these in houses, institutions, offices and hotels etc, without any vain. In search of fulfilling the wireless demands, Wi-Fi product vendors and service contributors are exploding up as quickly as possible. Wireless networks offer handiness, mobility, and can even be less expensive to put into practice than wired networks in many cases. With the consumer demand, vendor solutions and industry standards, wireless network technology is factual and is here to stay. But how far this technology is going provide a protected environment in terms of privacy is again an anonymous issue. Realizing the miscellaneous threats and vulnerabilities associated with 802.11-based wireless networks and ethically hacking them to make them more secure is what this paper is all about. On this segment, we'll seize a look at common threats, vulnerabilities related with wireless networks. And also we have discussed the entire process of cracking WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption of WiFi, focusing the necessity to become familiar with scanning tools like Cain, NetStumbler, Kismet and MiniStumbler to help survey the area and tests we should run so as to strengthen our air signals.

K Sai Ramani

Papers

Wireless hacking - a WiFi hack by cracking WEP