Emerging Developments in Cybersecurity: Addressing Systemic Weaknesses in a Connected World

Dear Colleagues,

Recently, there has been an explosion of attacks targeting common systems. Secure solutions are often recommended to combat these threats. However, a secure system, whether it be an IoT device or an HPC cluster, is only as secure as its weakest component. Furthermore, new and emerging threats consistently reveal that these “secure-by-design” solutions are lacking. Rather than seeking to combat piecemeal threats with ad hoc solutions, research should instead be focused on incorporating vulnerability discovery into the design life-cycle. Therefore, the purpose of this Special Issue is to seek contributions that not only investigate new hardware, microarchitectural, or software attacks but also automate exploit discovery against these computing systems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Side-channel and fault attack, and resilience/countermeasures;
• Intrusion and anomaly detection;
• CPS security;
• Smart grid security;
• Cloud security;
• Hardware security and privacy;
• Formal method-based security verification, program analysis, and fuzzing;
• Security tool development;
• Security-oriented hardware design, or hardware and software co-design;
• IoT devices and protocol security;
• Machine learning and artificial intelligence for vulnerability discovery;
• Empowering security with large language models;
• Security and resilience in autonomous vehicle systems.

Dr. Xiaolong Guo
Dr. Dean Sullivan
Guest Editors

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