Data-Driven Cybersecurity and Safety for Critical Applications and Infrastructures

Dear Colleagues,

Modern critical systems are pervasive and quite diversified in terms of scale, whether related to factories, utility infrastructures, vehicles, or even UAVs. Nevertheless, regardless of their size or scope, such systems have one thing in common: a set of special requirements in terms of security and safety, which ultimately classify them as “critical”. This is due to the sensitive nature of the involved control processes and applications, whose malfunction, whether accidental or resulting from malicious intervention, may pose a significant risk to human lives, assets, or essential services.

With the emergence of complex application scenarios, either new or evolved from existing ones, the distributed nature of such critical systems is quickly unfolding into a massive scale. Smart grids that have pushed infrastructure components such as smart meters and inverters up to the consumer’s doorstep, the creation of services for automated UAV airspace coordination, in the scope of collision avoidance frameworks, and even vehicular networks, whose emergence may help to overcome many of today’s problems associated with sustainable and safe mobility, are just a few examples. Ensuring the reliable, secure, and continuous operation of scenarios with such a scale implies the adoption of data-driven approaches that are capable of dealing with considerable amounts of information to support the dependable (semi)automated analysis and decision mechanisms such applications need to become feasible.

This Special Issue aims to present a collection of studies describing the latest advances in data-driven approaches to security and safety for critical applications, encompassing different application scenarios such as (but not limited to):

• data-driven cyber-security for critical infrastructures and essential services;
• vehicular networks and V2X scenarios;
• 5G-assisted security and safety mechanisms;
• UAV airspace coordination and navigation;
• industrial Internet of Things (IoT) safety and security applications;
• resiliency, stability, and fast control algorithms for smart grids; and
• algorithms and techniques for data-driven anomaly detection for safety and security.

Dr. Tiago Cruz
Dr. Paulo Simões
Guest Editors

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