IoT Security and Emerging Technologies

Dear Colleagues,

Current IoT security research often addresses vulnerabilities in isolation, such as cryptographic weaknesses, network protocols, hardware security or gaps in regulatory compliance. However, real-world attacks rarely respect these boundaries. Instead, adversaries, increasingly exploit cross-layer intersections, manipulating AI-driven intrusion detection systems, leveraging regulatory fragmentation to deploy insecure devices, exploiting firmware update mechanisms that lack post-quantum protection and compromising edge nodes as entry points into distributed networks. This fragmented approach is increasingly inadequate as IoT deployments scale to billions of heterogeneous devices across critical infrastructure, where single-point failures can cascade into system-wide compromises affecting public safety, economic stability and personal privacy.

Despite advances in device authentication, secure communication and intrusion detection, substantial challenges remain as IoT ecosystems continue to grow in complexity. These challenges span interconnected domains, integrating AI-driven security automation with privacy and transparency,  transitioning to post-quantum cryptographic under severe computational and energy constraints, designing zero-trust and edge-computing architectures that maintain security across heterogeneous protocols, developing operational resilience mechanisms for autonomous threat detection and recovery, establishing hardware roots of trust resilient to physical and side-channel attacks and implementing advanced security solutions that accommodate conflicting international regulations while meeting real-world constraints such as battery life, latency and legacy system integration.

This Special Issue seeks contributions that advance system-level resilience and practical deployment strategies for next-generation IoT security. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Energy-efficient and secure IoT systems using AI-driven optimization
• Agentic AI for autonomous IoT security management
• Security challenges in large-scale IoT deployments
• Data privacy in IoT ecosystems
• IoT network attacks and defenses
• Automated compliance for IoT/OT devices
• Automated recovery orchestration using IoT
• Secure boot and firmware update mechanisms in IoT
• Post-quantum cryptography and IoT
• Regulatory and compliance challenges in IoT security
• Federated and machine learning for privacy-preserving IoT security
• Zero-trust architecture for IoT environments
• Edge computing security for IoT systems
• Healthcare IoT (IoMT) security and data protection
• Digital forensics in IoT ecosystems

We  look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Nabeel Khan
Dr. Mastaneh Davis
Guest Editors

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• IoT security
• system-level resilience
• AI-driven security
• post-quantum cryptography
• edge computing security
• zero-trust architecture