New Trends in Cybersecurity and Hardware Design for IoT

Dear Colleagues,

With the accelerated penetration of Internet of Thing (IoT) technology into critical areas such as industrial Internet and smart cities, security issues are still a focus of attention. Traditional IoT devices generally lack considerations of security mechanisms during the hardware design stage, resulting in widespread exposure of known vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Although AI/LLM techniques have enhanced the security protection abilities of the IoTs, new threats such as quantum computing cracking and deepfake instructions are still emerging, while the existing protective measures struggle to tackle these rapidly evolving attacks. Therefore, we must urgently build a new generation of security architecture that integrates hardware-based trust mechanisms and AI/LLM-driven dynamic defenses to provide full-stack protection for the IoT eco-system.

This Special Issue seeks cutting-edge advances, techniques, insights and innovative solutions to tackle the emerging security issues and challenges in the scenario of the integration of cybersecurity and hardware design, exploring cross-domain collaborative protection schemes of "chip-network-platform-application" and new paradigm of "trusted hardware +AI/LLM defense".

Topics of interest for the Special Issue include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Hardware-trusted roots (PUF, TRNG, PQC, RFF, and other security primitives);
• Co-design/verification of security elements and hardware/software for IoT systems;
• Advances in dynamic secure IoT architecture attack and defense;
• New network and physical attack, evolution and analysis;
• Real-time threat perception and response mechanism in the IoT scenarios;
• Distributed identity authentication protocols under resource-constrained conditions;
• Endogenous security and immune protection for IoT application;
• Integration of RISC-V, blockchain, zero trust mechanisms, hardware accelerators and quantum computing, etc., with IoT

We encourage researchers and practitioners including individuals, academics, organizations, and industries to contribute original research and innovative approaches to explore advancements and innovations in "secure native" IoT architecture and ecosystems.

Dr. Zhao Huang
Dr. Zeyu Li
Prof. Dr. Xiaohong Jiang
Dr. Yanping Chen
Guest Editors

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