Advanced Sensing and IoT in Smart Manufacturing and Industrial Cybersecurity

Dear Colleagues,

Smart manufacturing increasingly couples advanced sensors and distributed sensor networks, the Industrial Internet of Everything (IoX), edge–cloud control, and AI analytics, expanding the attack surface across IT/operational technology (OT) boundaries.

This Special Issue of Sensors invites original research on sensing-enabled cybersecurity and reliable industrial IoT architectures that maintain safety, availability, and quality during active operations adversaries. We encourage contributions on adversarial machine learning and model security in sensor-based systems, including robust training, runtime monitoring, and provenance tracking for deployed models. Research on IoX and OT security with a focus on secure sensing architectures, sensor network segmentation, time-sensitive sensor communications, and safety-aware verification is particularly welcome.

By integrating sensing technologies, sensor network communications, and cybersecurity, this issue aims to advance resilient, measurable Industry 4.0/5.0 ecosystems and to promote frameworks for future security architectures within the emerging Industry 6.0 paradigm.

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) for heterogeneous sensor devices and their identity management;
• Ransomware resilience and incident response for sensor-driven cyber-physical production lines;
• Secure sensor data governance in cloud and multi-cloud environments for digital twins and data sharing;
• AI-driven threat detection and security analytics tailored to sparse, high-rate sensor telemetry.

Also within the scope:

• Software supply chain security and SBOM methods for embedded sensor firmware and analytics pipelines;
• Post-quantum cryptography and cryptographic agility for long-lived industrial sensor networks.
• Privacy-preserving security for sensor data (e.g., federated learning, differential privacy);
• Human factors and social engineering defense in sensor-intensive industrial environments (phishing, insider threats, game-theoretic approaches).

Dr. Mohammad Shahin
Guest Editor

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