The need to enhance convenience, transparency and reduce costs has led to the adoption of smart cities in most countries. In this environment, a myriad of internet of things devices such as sensors and actuators exchange large volumes of highly sensitive and private data. There is therefore need to develop security frameworks, protocols and architectures to offer the much required protection to the exchanged data. To this end, numerous schemes have been put forward by various researchers over the recent past. In this paper, a broad review is provided of the security, privacy and performance issues of these schemes in a smart city environment. Based on the obtained results, it is evident that the attainment of ideal security and privacy for the data exchanged over open wireless channels is an uphill task. Therefore, some recommendations are given on how best the security solutions should be tailored to bridge this gap.