Advances in Cybersecurity, Data Privacy, Robotics, and Cloud and Service Computing

Dear Colleagues,

In today's digitally driven world, the intersections of cybersecurity, data privacy, robotics, and cloud and service computing have emerged as pillars of technological advancement and societal progress. The exponential growth of interconnected systems, the proliferation of sensitive data, the rapid evolution of robotic technologies, and the widespread adoption of cloud-based services have collectively heightened the need for innovative research and solutions in these domains. This Special Issue aims to explore the latest breakthroughs, challenges, and synergies across these critical fields, fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue to address the complex demands of modern technology ecosystems.

Cybersecurity has evolved far beyond traditional threat defence, now encompassing the dynamic protection of networks, applications, and infrastructure against increasingly sophisticated risks such as ransomware, zero-day exploits, and supply chain vulnerabilities. These measures are vital for preserving system integrity across diverse sectors, including healthcare and finance. In parallel, the surge in the collection and exchange of personal and sensitive information has heightened the importance of data privacy, necessitating robust safeguards such as encryption, anonymization, and privacy-preserving algorithms to uphold ethical standards and comply with global regulations. At the same time, rapid advances in robotics—spanning industrial, healthcare, and autonomous environments—present unique challenges in securing communication, ensuring ethical decision-making, and preventing tampering or malicious control. Cloud and service computing offer unparalleled scalability and efficiency, but raise critical concerns over securing multi-tenant environments, protecting cloud-hosted data, and establishing trust between providers and users. Complementing these domains, multi-agent systems (MASs) facilitate collaborative problem-solving across distributed robotic or IoT networks, but require robust security protocols for inter-agent communication and privacy-preserving coordination. Similarly, cyber–physical systems (CPSs)—which integrate computational and physical processes in smart grids, autonomous vehicles, and industrial control systems—intensify the demand for cross-layer security, real-time data protection, and resilient operation in the face of evolving cyber threats.

This Special Issue invites contributions from researchers, practitioners, and industry experts to showcase cutting-edge research, innovations, and case studies that address these interconnected challenges. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Advanced intrusion detection and adaptive cybersecurity frameworks
• Privacy-enhancing technologies for big data, AI, and robotic systems
• Secure communication, computing, and control in robotics and IoT systems
• Trustworthy cloud architectures and secure data management
• AI/ML applications in cybersecurity, privacy, and robotic control
• Blockchain for security in cloud and robotic systems
• Distributed consensus mechanisms under adversarial attacks
• Multi-agent reinforcement learning for collaborative threat mitigation
• Dynamic role allocation and attack tolerance in heterogeneous agent networks

Dr. Zengwang Jin
Dr. Yaqiang Liu
Dr. Qing Wang
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.

• intrusion detection
• privacy-enhancing technologies
• secure robotics & IoT
• trustworthy cloud
• AI-driven security
• blockchain security
• resilient consensus
• multi-agent defense