A Systematic Review of Cybersecurity Testbeds for Smart Environments: Architectures, Attack Coverage, and Defensive Evidence

Abstract

Smart-environment cybersecurity increasingly depends on experimental platforms that can reproduce attacks against buildings, homes, and cities under realistic conditions. However, the literature remains fragmented across testbed design, attack demonstration, and defensive validation. This makes it particularly difficult to judge what kind of security evidence each study actually provides. This review systematically analyses 28 experimentally grounded studies published from 2020 onwards, focusing on how testbed realism, cyber–physical coupling, and evaluation mode shape the strength of the resulting claims. The corpus spans physical, hybrid, emulated, and dataset-driven environments across smart buildings, smart homes, and smart cities. Through our investigation, we discern a clear asymmetry in the field. Detection-oriented studies dominate, especially those based on emulation or public datasets, while live evidence for prevention, response, containment, and recovery is comparatively scarce. Availability and integrity/control attacks are the most frequently exercised, whereas authentication compromise and software exploitation remain rare because they are harder to stage on real hardware. Moreover, an important observation we arrive at is that physical and hardware-in-the-loop platforms support the strongest cyber–physical evidence, but emulated and replayed environments remain valuable for scale and reproducibility. At the same time, public datasets and offline classification results do not by themselves establish operational resilience in a live smart environment. To make these distinctions explicit, we introduce a cross-domain taxonomy of testbed architectures, attack families, and defensive control coverage, and map the evidence strength of reported mitigations using NIST cybersecurity framework-derived operational functions. Last, we identify open challenges, including weak recovery evaluation, limited reuse of reference testbeds, and the need for live, context-aware datasets, outlining promising future directions.