Emerging Trends in IoT/Blockchain Security and Privacy

Dear Colleagues,

The convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technology has opened up exciting opportunities for decentralized, secure, and autonomous systems. However, this integration also brings forth critical security and privacy challenges that demand urgent attention. This Special Issue aims to explore cutting-edge research that addresses the vulnerabilities, threat models, defense mechanisms, and privacy-preserving strategies at the intersection of IoT and blockchain technologies.

(1) Focus, Scope, and Purpose

• Focus: The primary focus of this Special Issue is to highlight recent advances in the security and privacy of IoT and blockchain systems, especially where these technologies intersect in distributed applications such as smart cities, supply chains, healthcare, industrial IoT, and edge computing.
• Scope: We welcome high-quality, original research articles, review papers, and case studies that investigate new architectures, security models, lightweight cryptographic protocols, privacy-preserving data management techniques, threat detection algorithms, secure consensus mechanisms, and decentralized identity management. Special attention will be given to resource-constrained environments, real-time communication, and multi-stakeholder ecosystems.
• Purpose: This topical collection aims to bring together the latest developments and insights from academia and industry to address both theoretical and practical aspects of IoT/blockchain security. It seeks to encourage the development of secure, trustworthy, and privacy-aware IoT-blockchain ecosystems and to provide researchers and practitioners with new tools and methodologies for building robust systems.

(2) Relationship to Existing Literature

While both IoT and blockchain technologies have individually received considerable attention in the context of cybersecurity, the literature exploring their intersection remains in its early stages. Many open problems exist around scalability, key management, transaction anonymity, attack resilience, and trust coordination. This Special Issue seeks to fill these gaps by curating a comprehensive collection of works that address these emerging concerns with novel solutions. By showcasing interdisciplinary research that spans cryptography, distributed systems, machine learning, and network security, this issue will serve as a timely and valuable supplement to existing studies, helping to define the next generation of secure IoT-blockchain systems.

We invite contributions from researchers and practitioners worldwide who are working on the forefront of these challenges.

Prof. Dr. Yunshu Liu
Dr. Peng Sun
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• IoT security
• blockchain privacy
• decentralized identity
• secure smart contracts
• lightweight cryptography
• intrusion detection in IoT
• privacy-preserving data sharing
• secure edge and fog computing
• cross-layer threat modeling
• consensus protocol security