Trustworthy Networking

Dear Colleagues,

Empowered by the rapid development of communication, networking, and data science technologies over the past decade, especially with the Internet of Things (IoT), the fifth generation (5G) and beyond of mobile networks, artificial intelligence (AI), and data-driven applications have permeated into every corner of modern society. With the exploding volume of data traffic over telecommunication networks and the blooming diversity in the nature of such data, risks in data security and privacy are also dramatically increasing. Such risks typically include, but are not limited to, unauthorized exposure, misrepresentation, fabrication, and abuse of confidential user data. On the one hand, in the numerous data-driven services that have already been widely deployed, these attacks threaten the property, personal safety, and privacy of the users in a wide spectrum. On the other hand, the serious concerns raised by such threats hinder new data-driven solutions from being deployed, which significantly impairs the development and innovation of technology.

In response to this emerging challenge, trustworthiness is becoming an essential feature and key value indicator for future communication, networking, and multi-agent systems. As a complex application-layer feature, trust is established on top of the availability, integrity, confidentiality, authenticity, auditability, completeness, and timeliness of information. It therefore calls for a complete set of novel solutions in technological fields such as authentication, encryption, physical layer security, access control, and anomaly detection; as well as new technical–social measures in various perspectives such as standardization, legislation, regulation, and supervision. In this Special Issue, we solicit original papers including (but not limited to) the following areas:

• Theories, architecture, and applications of trustworthy networking
• Trust modeling, trust policies, and trust mechanisms
• Network trust evaluation and measurement
• Machine learning for network trust, security, and privacy
• Blockchain and trustworthy networking
• Trust, security, and privacy in machine learning and AI
• Trust, security, and privacy in cloud computing and MEC
• Trust, security, and privacy in IoT and sensor networks
• Trust, security, and privacy in multi-agent systems
• Trust, security, and privacy of digital twin in 6G
• Trust, security, and privacy of wireless positioning
• Trust, security, and privacy in social learning and social networks
• End-to-end communication security, privacy, and trust
• Cryptography and trustworthy networking
• Incentive mechanisms of trust management
• Physical layer security and trust 
• Post-quantum cryptography
• Regulation and standardization of security, privacy, and trust

Dr. Bin Han
Guest Editor

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. Network is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly 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 1000 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.

• trust
• security
• privacy
• multi-agent system
• social learning