Security and Privacy in Vehicular Networks: Emerging Challenges, Intelligent Defenses, and Trustworthy V2X Communications

Dear Colleagues,

Vehicular networks are rapidly evolving from traditional vehicular ad hoc networks into highly connected, intelligent, and software-defined ecosystems involving Internet of Vehicles, V2X/C-V2X communications, autonomous vehicles, roadside infrastructure, edge/cloud computing, digital twins, blockchain, and AI-enabled decision-making. These developments are transforming transportation systems by enabling real-time safety services, cooperative perception, intelligent traffic management, autonomous mobility, and data-driven smart-city applications.

However, the increasing connectivity, heterogeneity, and autonomy of vehicular systems also introduce serious security and privacy challenges. Vehicles, roadside units, sensors, mobile devices, cloud platforms, and edge nodes exchange large volumes of safety-critical and privacy-sensitive data. This creates new attack surfaces, including identity spoofing, Sybil attacks, message tampering, location tracking, data leakage, denial-of-service attacks, malware, adversarial machine learning, and attacks against in-vehicle networks and V2X infrastructures. Ensuring secure, privacy-preserving, low-latency, and scalable vehicular communication is therefore essential for the deployment of trustworthy intelligent transportation systems.

This Special Issue aims to bring together high-quality original research and review articles addressing recent advances, open challenges, and future directions in security and privacy for vehicular networks. We welcome theoretical, experimental, and applied contributions on secure communication protocols, privacy-preserving authentication, intrusion detection, blockchain-enabled trust, AI-driven security, lightweight cryptography, secure edge/fog computing, digital twins, and resilient architectures for next-generation vehicular systems.

Suggested Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Security and privacy in VANETs, IoV, V2X, C-V2X, and 6G-enabled vehicular networks;
• Lightweight authentication and key agreement protocols for vehicular communications;
• Privacy-preserving identity management, pseudonym schemes, and location privacy;
• Intrusion detection and anomaly detection for in-vehicle and V2X networks;
• Blockchain, distributed ledger, and decentralized trust management for smart transportation;
• AI, machine learning, and federated learning for vehicular cybersecurity;
• Security of autonomous and connected vehicles;
• Secure edge, fog, and cloud computing for vehicular networks;
• Digital twin security and privacy for intelligent transportation systems;
• Physical-layer security for V2V, V2I, and C-V2X communications;
• Secure data sharing, access control, and encryption in vehicular environments;
• Misbehavior detection, trust evaluation, and reputation management;
• Security of software-defined vehicular networks and network slicing;
• Adversarial attacks and robust AI for vehicular systems;
• Post-quantum and lightweight cryptographic solutions for vehicular networks;
• Secure emergency message dissemination and safety-critical vehicular applications;
• Privacy-preserving data analytics for smart mobility and intelligent transportation;
• Experimental testbeds, cyber ranges, datasets, and real-world evaluations for vehicular cybersecurity.

Dr. Muhammad Waqas
Dr. Mohammad Al-Antary
Guest Editors

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• vehicular networks
• V2X communications
• Internet of Vehicles
• cybersecurity
• privacy preservation
• authentication
• intrusion detection
• trust management
• blockchain
• artificial intelligence