Safety and security of the smart city ??? when our infrastructure goes online

Cyberspace will be a vital component for cities of the future, as their infrastructures go on-line. Cities have a central role as the drivers of wealth and innovation for the nation and we rely on safe, secure and resilient cities. Reminding the broader readership about the evolving nature of Cyberspace, this paper considers four forces for change: mobility, cloud and location-based services, the Internet of Things, Big Data and public trust. Building on that perspective of Cyberspace, the paper then proposes four problematic engineering characteristics of hyperconnectivity, messy complexity, loss of boundary and industrialised hacking that make security of Cyberspace a complex engineering problem for which we lack adequate analysis tools and techniques. We assert that systems in Cyberspace cannot be made completely secure, so we ask can a city´s on-line infrastructure be considered safe? Safety and security engineers have a responsibility to collaborate with systems engineers to develop techniques to resolve these issues and to push the business case for resilience. Given the growth in the size and scale of cities, skills and knowledge in building resilient smart cities will be in demand around the world and this paper provides a blueprint for progress.