Special Issue on “Emerging Paradigms in Distributed Trustworthy Cyber-Physical-Social Systems”

Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSSs) have emerged as a transformative paradigm that integrates the digital, physical and social dimensions of our interconnected world. These systems offer specific advantages and opportunities across various domains, such as streamlined operations, optimized resource allocation, improved decision-making processes, as well as increased productivity and effectiveness.

Nonetheless, CPSSs bring forth data security and privacy concerns. As user data is highly sensitive and personal, the transition to an advanced technology-supported DTCPS paradigm accentuates potential vulnerabilities and risks. Ensuring the secure transfer, storage and processing of sensitive data in such a cyber-physical environment is crucial.

We propose this special section in Cyber Security and Applications to bring together studies on novel theories, models, technologies and systems in the security and privacy domain. It focuses on advanced developments, technologies and challenges regarding emerging paradigms in distributed trustworthy CPPSs. It will also be based on the upcoming conference BlockSys'2024 (https://blocksys.info/2024/).

We hope that this special section will be mutually beneficial to CSA and the BlockSys'2024 conference in terms of publicity, potential highly cited papers and journal subscriptions.

The special issue will provide a wide range of coverage of this rapidly changing area and provides valuable insights and recommendations for researchers, practitioners and policymakers in the fields of distributed systems, cybersecurity and social sciences. We are particularly interested in the latest research findings and review articles.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Trustworthy integration of cyber, physical, and social components in distributed trustworthy CPSSs
• Privacy-preserving techniques for secure data sharing in CPSSs
• Advances in data integrity and anomaly detection in CPSSs
• Blockchain, metaverse and service computing applications in CPSSs
• Scalability and fault tolerance mechanisms for CPSSs
• Collaborative data processing in CPSSs
• Trust management for reliable collaboration among distributed entities
• Adaptive security mechanisms for evolving cyber threats
• Physical unclonable functions and hardware security
• Advances in cross-domain data aggregation technologies in CPSSs
• Secure IoT sensor association in cyber-physical-social systems
• Machine learning for blockchain
• Interpretability and Explainability of machine learning models in cybersecurity
• Privacy preserving machine learning
• Trustworthy machine learning

Submission instructions:

Manuscripts must be prepared according to the Guide for Authors before being submitted to Cyber Security and Applications online. All articles should be submitted online. Please select the article type “VSI: Emerging Paradigms in DTCPSSs”.

Important dates:

Submission deadline: Mar 15, 2025

Publication: As per the policy of journal

Guest Editor Details:

Dr. Haowen Tan

Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, China

Email: tanhaowen@ieee.org

Google Scholar:

https://scholar.google.com.hk/citations?hl=en&user=1X0XYtQAAAAJ&view_op=list_works

Haowen Tan received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China, in 2013 and 2016, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Engineering, Chosun University, Gwangju, Korea, in 2020. From 2021 to 2022, he was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow with the Cyber Security Centre, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan. He is currently an associate professor with the School of Information Science and Engineering, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, China. His research interests include network security, ubiquitous sensor networks, blockchain, and vehicular ad-hoc networks. He has published over 40 journal and conference papers in IEEE TITS, TVT, EAAI, FGCS, JNCA etc. His google scholar citation is over 1400, with h-index 15. He is an Associate Editor (AE) of Cyber Security and Applications (CSA) journal.

Dr. Wei Guo

University of Cagliari, Italy

Email: wei.guo@unica.it

Google Scholar:

https://scholar.google.com.hk/citations?user=YMDNOXsAAAAJ&hl=zh-CN&newwindow=1

Wei (David) Guo received his Ph.D. from University of Siena, Italy, in 2023 with a thesis named ‘Backdoor Attacks and Defences on Deep Neural Network’. His M.Eng. and B.Sc. degrees were obtained in 2018 and 2015 at Guilin University of Electronic Technology, China. Now, his research topics focus on AI security and robustness, specifically, backdoor attack and adversarial example. He has published journal and conference papers in IEEE TIFS, TDSC, TII and PRL etc. His professional service and activity as a reviewer of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2023, International Conference on Learning Representations 2023.

Dr. Yunguo Guan

Eastern Michigan University, USA

Email: yguan1@emich.edu

Google Scholar:

https://scholar.google.com.hk/citations?hl=zh-CN&user=S7m_fUwAAAAJ

Yunguo Guan obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of New Brunswick, Canada, in 2023. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Security and Applied Computing, Eastern Michigan University in the United States. His research interests include applied cryptography and game theory.