With the exponential growth of interconnected devices and computers, cyber-physical systems have experienced a significant growth of cyber-attack incidents resulting in huge property losses. Cyber-attacks, caused by malware, software vulnerabilities, privacy breaches, diverse smart attackers, etc., are undoubtedly growing matters of public concern. For example, attacks on sensors, inter-vehicle communications, and entertainment platforms can enable hackers to steal, modify, and destroy sensitive data. In more extreme cases, hackers may gain access to system controls.

Conventional security schemes alone are insufficient to safeguard networks and protect user privacy for certain applications. Moreover, current network architectures face further security concerns as they are vulnerable to new types of attacks due to the utilization of the emerging technologies, such as software-defined networking (SDN), artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain. For example, adversarial attacks could be carried out to fool AI models through undetected malicious inputs. Therefore, innovative and pioneering defense mechanisms are urgently needed in the cybersecurity domain to ensure security and privacy for systems and users.

This special section mainly focuses on privacy, attack, and defense in cybersecurity. We solicit papers on topics including, but not limited to:

Privacy-preserving protocols and architectures
Novel provable secure cryptographic schemes and protocols
Lightweight cryptographic schemes and protocols
New methods of threat modeling
Privacy and security in AI and machine learning
Privacy and security in SDN and 5G wireless networks
Privacy and security in blockchain systems
Privacy and security in IoT
Design of post-quantum cryptography
Secure authentication and access control
Hardware attacks and defenses
Real-time intrusion detection and risk management
New methods for malware and software vulnerability detection