Emerging Techniques for Privacy, Security and Trusted Execution in IoT Systems

A special issue of Information (ISSN 2078-2489). This special issue belongs to the section "Information Security and Privacy".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 September 2026 | Viewed by 557

Special Issue Editors

School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Interests: applied cryptography; secure multi-party computation; privacy; security; machine learning; IoT

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410000, China
Interests: artificial intelligence; information security; adversarial attacks; recommendation systems; big data and distributed computing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues, 

Internet of Things (IoT) systems enable the pervasive interconnection of heterogeneous devices, sensors, and services, tightly integrating the cyber world with the physical environment. By combining sensing, computation, communication, and actuation, IoT systems operate across diverse spatial and temporal scales and support a wide spectrum of applications, including smart cities, industrial automation, intelligent transportation, healthcare monitoring, energy management, and environmental sensing. These applications are central to the realization of intelligent, autonomous, and data-driven systems that interact seamlessly with the physical world and play critical roles in modern society.

With the rapid expansion and large-scale deployment of IoT infrastructures, concerns regarding privacy protection, system security, and trusted execution have become increasingly critical. IoT devices are often resource-constrained, highly distributed, and exposed to untrusted environments, making them particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks, data leakage, and integrity violations. Emerging techniques, such as lightweight cryptography, secure and privacy-preserving data analytics, trusted execution environments, hardware-assisted security, decentralized trust, and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled mechanisms, are therefore essential to safeguarding IoT systems. This Special Issue aims to bring together cutting-edge research that advances the state of the art in privacy, security, and trusted execution for IoT systems, addressing both theoretical foundations and practical challenges in building resilient and trustworthy IoT ecosystems.

Dr. Ye Dong
Prof. Dr. Mingxing Duan
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. Information 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 1800 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.

Keywords

  • lightweight cryptography
  • secure and privacy-preserving data analytics
  • trusted hardware-assisted security
  • decentralized trust
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled security and privacy

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

  • Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
  • Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
  • Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
  • External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
  • Reprint: MDPI Books provides the opportunity to republish successful Special Issues in book format, both online and in print.

Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (1 paper)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

24 pages, 531 KB  
Article
VMkCwPIR: A Single-Round Scalable Multi-Keyword PIR Protocol Supporting Non-Primary Key Queries
by Junyu Lu, Shengnan Zhao, Yuchen Huang, Zhongtian Jia, Lili Zhang and Chuan Zhao
Information 2026, 17(4), 337; https://doi.org/10.3390/info17040337 - 1 Apr 2026
Viewed by 318
Abstract
Keyword Private Information Retrieval (Keyword PIR) enables private querying over keyword-based databases, which are typically sparse, as opposed to the dense arrays used in standard Index PIR. However, existing Keyword PIR schemes are limited to single-keyword queries and generally assume that keywords serve [...] Read more.
Keyword Private Information Retrieval (Keyword PIR) enables private querying over keyword-based databases, which are typically sparse, as opposed to the dense arrays used in standard Index PIR. However, existing Keyword PIR schemes are limited to single-keyword queries and generally assume that keywords serve as unique identifiers, making them inadequate for practical scenarios where keywords are non-unique attributes and clients need to retrieve records matching multiple keywords simultaneously. To bridge this gap, we propose MkCwPIR, the first single-round, exact-match multi-keyword PIR protocol that supports conjunctive keyword queries while preserving strict keyword privacy against the server. Our construction employs Constant-weight codes and Newton–Girard identities to encode multi-keyword selection into a compact algebraic representation, representing a functional extension of CwPIR (Usenix Security ’22). While this functional expansion introduces additional computational overhead due to the processing of multiple keywords, we further introduce VMkCwPIR—an optimized variant leveraging BFV vectorized homomorphic encryption. Experimental results demonstrate that although the base MkCwPIR incurs higher latency due to its enhanced logical capabilities, the vectorized optimizations in VMkCwPIR effectively close this performance gap. Consequently, VMkCwPIR achieves a performance level comparable to the single-keyword CwPIR. Experimental results demonstrate that when processing a query with eight keywords, VMkCwPIR achieves a server-side execution time comparable to executing only four independent single-keyword queries in CwPIR, while maintaining constant communication overhead for up to 16 keywords. Full article
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop