Emerging Topics in Cybersecurity: Challenges and Solutions

Dear Colleagues,

Computing systems are becoming more and more pervasive in our everyday lives; they are spreading across a variety of technological and administrative domains, and their heterogeneity is continuously increasing.  Indeed, cloud infrastructures are used to offload personal devices, modern wireless connectivity allows for ubiquitous mobility, and low-power communications and edge/fog computing enable us to integrate cyber–physical systems in our daily routines.

These technologies have made it possible to originate and capture massive amounts of data, allowing for advantages and new services in numerous fields, e.g., to enhance the efficiency of healthcare management, infrastructure such as power distribution networks, city traffic management, crisis response, disaster resilience, and emergency management.

Additionally, such technologies and systems necessitate the sharing of data—that might include sensitive data—between many organizations.

Billions of heterogeneous systems that continuously send and receive data packets over the network, and technological and functional boundaries of software platforms that become more and more vague and aleatory, make the managing of such computing systems the most enduring challenge. As the complexity of the grid increases, the chances of faults also increases: even one single sensor transmitting faulty data can destabilize the whole functionality of the system.

Indeed, confidentiality, integrity, and availability properties are continuously and severely jeopardized at all levels due to the huge attack surface and due to new day-by-day designed cyberattacks targeting customers accessing the networks, communication infrastructures, and edge devices, while even targeting the people managing these computing systems.

Cybersecurity, hence, becomes a key element in the security and stability of computing systems since it is not only required for smart grids and smart cities, but also for traditional., i.e., non-smart, systems.

This Special Issue is intended to provide an opportunity to discuss and share what relates to the challenges that are still open, and the direction toward which research efforts are headed, as well as direct concrete experiences aimed at advancing the state-of-the-art methodologies and approaches for cybersecurity. In this context, we intend to select works covering one or more of the following topics:

• Confidentiality, integrity and privacy for public, private, and hybrid clouds;
• Emerging problems and recent trends in the field of IoT, fog, and edge computing security;
• Attack detection and mitigation techniques and strategies;
• Secure development methodologies;
• Secure and trustworthy IoT applications;
• Distributed architectures in support of IoT security;
• Models and technologies for security management, configuration, and accounting;
• Model-based analysis and security assessment.

Dr. Alessandra De Benedictis
Dr. Salvatore Barone
Guest Editors

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• edge/fog/cloud-distributed computing for IoT
• IoT data privacy
• cloud security