Hardware Security and AI-Assured Optimization for Smart Infrastructures

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue focuses on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of hardware security and AI-assisted optimization for smart infrastructure systems. As traditional infrastructure increasingly evolves toward intelligence, autonomy, and large-scale connectivity, its reliable operation depends critically on the trustworthiness of underlying hardware components that support AI-driven perception, decision-making, and control. The globalization of hardware design and manufacturing supply chains exposes infrastructure to sophisticated hardware-level threats, including hardware supply chain security, hardware trojans, side-channel  and fault injection attacks, firmware tampering, printed circuit board (PCB) security, and chip reverse engineering. These vulnerabilities can silently undermine AI-driven systems, compromise system behavior, and erode trust in intelligent infrastructure, making hardware security a foundational requirement rather than an isolated concern.

Addressing these challenges requires cross-layer approaches that integrate secure hardware mechanisms with AI-based analysis, monitoring, and optimization techniques. AI can strengthen hardware security assurance through intelligent validation, anomaly detection, runtime monitoring, and adaptive defense, while trusted hardware foundations can enhance the robustness and reliability of AI-enabled systems. This Special Issue aims to bring together research that bridges secure hardware design and AI-enabled security assurance and optimization, with an emphasis on proactive defense, runtime trust assessment, and system-level resilience.

This Special Issue welcomes original research contributions focusing on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Trusted execution environments and hardware roots of trust;
• Secure hardware and system-on-chip (SoC) design methodologies;
• AI-driven security validation, verification, and assurance at different level of supply chain;
• Hardware-aware attack detection and resilience optimization;
• Reverse Engineering for security testing and vulnerability assessment.

Dr. Arvind Sharma
Dr. Shao-Fang Wen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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