Securing Spatial Data Infrastructures in the Context of Smart Cities

Spatial Data Infrastructures play a very important role in linking and integrating various distributed systems in smart city applications. One such concept called Smart District Data Infrastructure (SDDI) is already being implemented in different districts of European cities, which allows managing various actors, stakeholders, sensors, simulation tools and semantic 3D city models within one common operational framework. Such distributed systems involve open data sources belonging to different platforms. On the other side, there are various users and applications who want to access and work on all these systems in convenient ways using single sign-on. If not secured, it may cause a major threat to disclose sensitive information to untrusted or unauthorized entities. This paper presents a novel implementation approach of securing distributed components of the SDDI in the district Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London. It establishes proper authorization and authentication to allow privacy, security and controlled access to all stakeholders and the respective components. The implementation combines the use of state-of-the-art concepts such as OAuth2 access tokens, OpenID Connect user claims and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) based Single-Sign-On (SSO) authentication.