Bridging the Smart City Cybersecurity Data Gap Through AI-Driven Synthetic Dataset Generation
For smart city cybersecurity researchers, this framework provides a solution to the data scarcity problem, enabling more effective threat modeling and defensive technique evaluation.
This work proposes an AI-based synthetic data generation framework to create high-fidelity cybersecurity datasets for smart cities, addressing the lack of accessible, privacy-preserving data. The synthetic datasets are evaluated for protocol conformity, statistical similarity, and utility in security tools.
Smart cities rely on interconnected cyber-physical systems that integrate sensors, IoT devices, cloud platforms, and AI-driven services and decision-making. While these systems enhance city services, they also introduce complex cybersecurity challenges due to their large attack surfaces, heterogeneous data flows, and evolving threat vectors. Developing and validating cybersecurity tools for smart cities requires high-quality datasets that accurately represent real operational conditions. However, real-world datasets are often incomplete, contain privacy-sensitive data, are difficult to access, or lack sufficient malicious activity to support tool development. This research addresses this critical gap by proposing an AI-based synthetic data generation (SDG) framework designed specifically for smart city cybersecurity research. The proposed framework leverages generative artificial intelligence models to produce high-fidelity synthetic cybersecurity datasets that replicate realistic device behaviors, network interactions, and cyber-attack scenarios. The synthetic datasets are evaluated for conformity to protocol standards, statistical similarity to original datasets, and utility in common security tools. The resulting synthetic data generation framework and evaluation metrics are expected to advance smart city cybersecurity by enabling researchers to model threats more effectively and evaluate defensive techniques more comprehensively to better protect critical smart city infrastructures.