Dear Colleagues:

The Internet of Things (IoT) is acquiring increasing importance in our daily lives. Its purpose to change the world by designing smart environments is realized by adaptive forms of cooperation among smart objects (SOs) that can collect and exchange a high quantity of data through network infrastructures, generally connecting millions of IoT nodes. This scenario generates a massive quantity of data to be processed, engendering several computational problems. Formerly, several cloud-based environments were realized for allowing access to IoT devices and providing them with communication, computational, and storage resources. This solution prevents the consumption of valuable resources from carrying out such activities locally. For example, in the Cloud of Things, data are stored and processed on the cloud and the results are sent to the IoT layer (Smart Objects). Unfortunately, the adoption of this architecture generates overheads as network latencies, which represent a very critical issue for IoT applications that are usually time sensitive. To solve the issues above, edge computing allows computational and communication overhead to be shifted from SOs, having limited power and computational resources, to edge servers provided with significant resources and nearby the SOs. This way, edge computing can relieve the peak in traffic flows, mitigate the bandwidth requirements, reduce the transmission latency during data computing or storage in IoT activities, and increase the IoT network lifetime and effectiveness. In such an edge computing IoT scenario, potentially heterogeneous SOs can cooperate with well-equipped SOs placed in their proximity to consume/produce services and/or extract/exchange knowledge.

However, trusting inappropriate counterparts can expose SOs to several potential threats due to malicious, fraudulent, and/or disliked behaviors. Risks can significantly increase in the presence of open and heterogeneous environments and/or when the involved relationships include fee payments or other valuable benefits. We argue that a certain level of confidence and mutual trustworthiness is fundamental for motivating the sharing actors to interact on the basis of a reasonable hope to be engaged in fulfilling interactions. Conversely, a poor level of confidence can compromise the possibility of choosing a reliable partner. To mitigate the risks due to unreliable partners, security and trust systems can be adopted to create a confident atmosphere. If security systems can guarantee that some crucial activities (e.g., payments) are executed correctly, trust and reputation systems are capable to provide a measure regarding the expectation that a trustor has to receive benefits from a trustee by taking into account direct or indirect information about past behaviors or events.

This Special Issue of Electronics aims to present papers in the domain of Security and Trust in IoT and Cloud Computing, including system architectures, models of trust and reputation, computational techniques, standards, and applications. We invite researchers to solicit novel and innovative research papers or insightful review papers.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Security solutions in IoT application domains (including but not limited to smart cities, industry 4.0, smart factories, intelligent transportation systems, digital healthcare, supply chain, etc.);
• Trust models, protocols and algorithms, and approaches for IoT systems;
• Security mechanisms for embedded IoT devices (malware protection, firmware security, OS hardening, secure software development, root-of-trust establishment, runtime integrity verification, remote attestation, and secure update mechanisms);
• Case studies of real security incidents related to IoT systems and applications;
• Approaches to guaranteeing security in Edge Computing (including but not limited to authentication and access control, availability and auditing, data security and privacy, formal methods, key management, lightweight cryptography, malware detection, protocol security for Edge Computing etc.);
• Trust management of edge system;
• Vulnerability analysis for Edge Computing;
• Emerging trends and new directions in security and trust in IoT and edge computing.

Dr. Domenico Rosaci
Guest Editor

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• trust and reputation
• security and privacy
• IoT
• edge computing