Everything before this panel in the Future Cities track has been about building, a vision keynote, then a roadmap turning it into real infrastructure. This panel asks what has to hold once it’s built: as Sarawak’s cities become data-rich, connected and increasingly autonomous, from smart city operating systems to the digital twins covered later in the track, they also become a bigger target. The panel brings together Malaysia’s own national cybersecurity authority with a counterpart from one of the region’s most mature digital-trust regimes, years ahead on securing exactly this kind of dense urban data infrastructure. Together they make the case that digital trust has to be engineered into the smart city roadmap from the start, not retrofitted after something goes wrong.