Open Urban Sensing Security in Fujisawa

🚨 Security
📍 Fujisawa, Japan

About

Status:

✅ Finalized

Fujisawa
🇯🇵 Japan
Fujisawa, located in Kanagawa Prefecture near Tokyo, is a coastal city known for its quality of life and innovative urban development. It gained global attention through the Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town project, integrating renewable energy, smart grids, and community services. With strong transport links and a focus on environmental sustainability, Fujisawa promotes resilient, citizen-centered urban planning.

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Fujisawa runs an open urban sensing platform and invites residents to report on city life by photograph. Both create value precisely because they are open — and both expose information that has to be protected. The city needs security and privacy built into each of them without closing either one down.

Description of the Challenge

Context

Fujisawa is a coastal city of about 429,000 residents in Kanagawa, a commuter hub for Yokohama and Tokyo and home to Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus. It had already run smart city programmes such as Fujisawa SST and G-Spatial before this work began, and its planning priorities — citizen wellness, disaster prevention, traffic safety and crime reduction — set what any urban technology is asked to demonstrate here. A mobile sensing platform, built on sensor-equipped refuse collection vehicles, had been operating with the city for more than three years.

Specific problem

A smart city IoT platform is valuable because it is open, scalable and able to collect and share many different kinds of city data. Those same qualities make it hard to secure: devices come from multiple manufacturers, data travels to third parties, and there is no single perimeter to defend. Participatory sensing adds a second exposure. When residents photograph their surroundings, the images incidentally capture faces, licence plates, house numbers and other details nobody intended to share — or even noticed.

Current situation and gap

Earlier projects built the sensing capability but left the security question open, and the participatory sensing methodology had never addressed how to protect the private content of citizen reports. A third gap appears the moment city data crosses borders: exchanging it between Japan and Europe raises confidentiality, compliance under both GDPR and Japan’s APPI, and the risk of sensitive information reaching a marketplace by accident. What is missing is protection at device, transport and cloud level, privacy handled before an image ever leaves the phone, and a way to trade city data across jurisdictions that can be shown to carry no personal information.

Expected Outcomes

Specific need

The city needs its existing sensing platform secured end to end without losing the openness and scalability that make it useful, and it needs citizens to be able to contribute photographs of city life without surrendering the private details those photographs contain.

Expected outcome

– Multi-layer protection across an operating sensing platform: device hardening and intrusion detection, encrypted device-to-cloud transport, and authenticated cloud access
– Privacy protection applied on the device, so sensitive content never leaves the citizen’s phone
– Encrypted distribution of citizen reports to defined groups rather than open publication
– Secure extension of sensing beyond its original fleet into other urban settings
– Cross-border data exchange that is demonstrably free of personal information and compliant under both GDPR and APPI
– Evidence that residents will take part once privacy is credibly protected

Space for Solutions and Experimentation

Fujisawa offers a working city as a testbed rather than a laboratory. The mobile sensing fleet is already deployed and operated jointly with the municipality, so solutions can be applied to a live platform with real data rather than a demonstrator. Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus sits inside the city, putting the research group and the deployment in the same place.

The city has a decade of smart city practice to build on — Fujisawa SST, G-Spatial, and successive EU–Japan research projects — and an established route into resident participation through city events. Fujisawa is also paired with Santander across several of those projects, which makes it a rare place to test whether city data can move securely between Japan and Europe with citizens on both ends.

The Pilot

Securing Mobile Sensing and Affective Participatory Reporting in Japan’s Pilot City

✅ Finalized

🗓️ Start: 2018-07-01

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🗓️ End: 2021-09-30
NTT East, Keio University and Fujisawa City ran the Japanese side of M-Sec, the EU–Japan project on multi-layered smart city security. Two use cases took place here: securing an operating mobile sensing platform end to end, and letting residents report on city life by photograph without giving up their privacy. Both fed a cross-border data marketplace shared with Santander.

Keio Secure Mobile Sensing Platform

🖥️ Platform
An operating urban mobile sensing platform, secured end to end. Multi-layer protection was applied across a live deployment: device hardening and intrusion detection on the IoT units, TLS point-to-point encryption for device-to-cloud traffic, and authenticated, lightly encrypted access in the cloud — without closing down the openness that makes the platform useful.

Urban Environmental Sensing Fleet Extension

⚡ Infrastructure
Extending a secured mobile sensing deployment beyond its original vehicle fleet. What began as sensor-equipped refuse collection vehicles grew during the pilot to cover restaurant ventilation, bus ventilation and university classroom air quality — all running on the same secure platform, at a moment when indoor ventilation had become a public health question.

SmileCityReport

🛠️ Tool
A mobile application through which residents report on city events by photograph, with sharing restricted to defined groups rather than published openly. Contributors could also offer their photographs for sale on the M-Sec marketplace, linking citizen reporting directly to a cross-border data exchange.

GANonymizer

🛠️ Tool
On-device privacy protection for citizen photography. GANonymizer uses deep learning to find and remove sensitive content from a photograph before it is shared. Because the processing happens on the phone rather than in the cloud, the sensitive version of the image never leaves the contributor’s device at all.

SOXFire Secure Data Distribution Framework

🛠️ Tool
A framework for encrypted data sharing among designated user groups. SOXFire handles the distribution of citizen reports so that only members of the intended group can read them — turning “shared securely” from an aspiration into something the infrastructure enforces.

M-Sec Data Marketplace

🖥️ Platform
A blockchain-based marketplace for anonymised IoT data. Data owners publish anonymised activity data; interested parties buy it with M-Sec Tokens, a cryptocurrency implemented as a smart contract. The contract verifies the buyer’s funds and completes the purchase by transferring the balance to the data owner, with no intermediary.

Interested in this challenge?

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