Advances in IoT Security and Privacy

Dear Colleagues,

The Internet of Things (IoT) is at the core of Digital Transformation (DX). The IoT Powering the Digital Economy is a key way businesses are transforming their operations today, from manufacturing to healthcare to smart cities. But the accelerating proliferation of IoT ecosystems has brought in its wake formidable security and privacy challenges, which have the potential to derail DX initiatives. Today, DX efforts that do not have security protection are exposed to data leaks, operation halts, malicious use of information, cyber-attacks, and loss of trust.

This Special Issue, “Advances in IoT Security and Privacy,” directly aligns with the core scope of Entropy by foregrounding the essential role of information-theoretic principles, entropy measures, and uncertainty quantification in addressing the security and privacy challenges inherent to Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems. In complex, decentralized, and resource-constrained IoT environments, traditional security paradigms often fall short. Instead, security and privacy emerge as fundamental problems of information flow, uncertainty, and control, precisely the domains where concepts such as entropy, mutual information, algorithmic complexity, and stochastic modeling provide principled, mathematically rigorous frameworks. Approaches grounded in information-theoretic security, entropy-based anomaly detection, privacy-preserving information encoding, and probabilistic modeling of adversarial behavior offer not only robust defenses but also quantifiable guarantees rooted in the physics of information.

We welcome high-quality, original research articles, reviews, and case studies that use entropy, information theory, uncertainty quantification, or complexity-based approaches to advance IoT security and privacy. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Information-theoretic cryptography and physical-layer security for resource-constrained IoT devices.
• Entropy-aware AI/ML methods for threat detection, including uncertainty quantification, information bottleneck optimization, and entropy-regularized learning.
• Domain-specific IoT security (e.g., healthcare, smart homes, industrial IoT) with formal privacy guarantees based on min-entropy, Rényi entropy, or differential privacy.
• Security architectures and trust models grounded in information flow analysis, mutual information bounds, or entropy-driven risk assessment.
• Blockchain and decentralized consensus mechanisms for IoT, analyzed through entropy-based metrics of fairness, randomness, or information dissemination
• Secure and verifiable firmware/software updates using entropy-based integrity fingerprints or randomness extraction from device behavior.
• Intrusion detection and anomaly identification based on statistical entropy, Kolmogorov complexity, or stochastic deviation from normal operational states.
• Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) with quantifiable information leakage limits, including entropy-minimizing data sanitization and obfuscation strategies.
• Real-world case studies that empirically evaluate security or privacy in IoT systems using information-theoretic metrics (e.g., entropy of sensor data, mutual information between attack signals and system responses).

Dr. Samsul Huda
Prof. Dr. Yasuyuki Nogami
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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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. Entropy is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 2600 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.