CYBERSECURITY CHALLENGES OF SMART UNIVERSITY INFRASTRUCTURE: A LAYERED THREAT ANALYSIS AND MITIGATION FRAMEWORK

Аннотация

The transformation of universities into smart campuses — saturated with Internet of Things devices, smart classrooms, integrated information systems and cloud services — substantially expands their attack surface while the protection mechanisms developed for traditional IT infrastructure prove insufficient for resource-constrained and heterogeneous IoT environments. This article systematizes the cybersecurity problems of smart university infrastructure on the basis of a layered analysis. Following the three-tier architecture of smart campus systems (perception, network, application), the principal asset groups and threats of each layer are identified: from weak default credentials and firmware vulnerabilities of end devices, through rogue access points, man-in-the-middle attacks and IoT botnets at the network layer, to phishing, ransomware and breaches of personal data at the application and data layer. A mitigation framework is proposed that organizes governance, technical and human-oriented measures along the functions of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and the requirements of ISO/IEC 27001, taking into account the budget and staffing constraints typical of universities. The results are oriented towards the higher education institutions implementing digital transformation, including the universities of Uzbekistan in the context of the national cybersecurity strategy for 2026–2030.