"The stock taking is important because at the heart of Smart Nation projects are Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices such as sensors or Web cameras, many of which do not even have a password protection mechanism for access control," said Mr Aloysius Cheang, Asia-Pacific executive vice-president of the Centre for Strategic Cyberspace + Security Science, a London-based think-tank.

At the very least, the Web cameras on smart lamp posts linked to surveillance systems must use tamper-proof cryptoprocessors, he said. But development in this space for IoT deployments is nascent and lacking global standardisation for safety.