# An Efficient Framework for Securing the Smart City Communication Networks
###### Abstract  
Recently, smart cities have increasingly been experiencing an evolution to improve the lifestyle of citizens and society. These emerge from the innovation of information and communication technologies (ICT) which are able to create a new economic and social opportunities. However, there are several challenges regarding our security and expectation of privacy. People are already involved and interconnected by using smart phones and other appliances. In many cities, smart energy meters, smart devices, and security appliances have recently been standardized. Full connectivity between public venues, homes, cares, and some other social systems are on their way to be applied, which are known as Internet of Things. In this paper, we aim to enhance the performance of security in smart city communication networks by using a new framework and scheme that provide an authentication and high confidentiality of data. The smart city system can achieve mutual authentication and establish the shared session key schemes between smart meters and the control center in order to secure a two-way communication channel. In our extensive simulation, we investigated and evaluated the security performance of the smart city communication network with and without our proposed scheme in terms of throughput, latency, load, and traffic received packet per seconds. Furthermore, we implemented and applied a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack and network intrusion detection system (NIDS) in our proposed technique to validate and measure the security requirements maintaining the constrained resources. smart city; cyber security for smart cities; communication wireless network; man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack; network intrusion detection system (NIDS) 20222222305330053  
Although a new city that connects everything through the internet smartly and electrically does not exist yet, many cities are on their way to develop the connectivity to be fully smart. However, the increasing number of security concerns have demonstrated that cyber attacks in smart cities are ubiquitous and can occur at any time. For critical infrastructure, complex cyber attacks can occur that may paralyze industrial control systems, which results in serious damage and terrible consequences. For humans, smart wearables, such as mobile ransomware and communications hijacking, are able to steal users' data and personal identity information (PII). For society, changing or manipulation of these data can consequently lead to widespread panic and public opinion that can also cause threaten social management. Furthermore, the cyber security risks have significantly become the most serious threats in terms of developing the interconnect facilities in smart cities and the self-driven car industry, where accident liability will also become a particularly important and hot topic [4]. Therefore, communication trust and security challenges in the deployment of smart city systems have recently become a source of concern. In particular, a smart electrical meter distributed in multiple hierarchical networks can significantly achieve mutual authentication and establish the exchange keys. In order to enhance the performance of the smart city communication network, the OPNET modeler will be used to implement both (1) the secure scenario with authentication and key session techniques and (2) another scenario without these techniques. Various objectives should be processed and carried out in order to build our contribution. These include studying and investigating the security methods of authentication and confidentiality data relating to smart city technology and the impact of its integration with various emerging technologies, as well as selecting and designing authentication and a key exchange schemes approach in order to secure smart city data.