Impaired driving, traffic congestion, and treacherous driving conditions have caused numerous accidents every year all over the world, leading to great suffering of people in different ways such as great anguish, fatal injuries, and horrendous loss of human lives. Due to these severe situations, VANETs (vehicular ad hoc networks) have recently received considerable attention from both industry and academia to not only improve road safety but also enhance traffic management. Not only that, as a special implementation of MANETs (mobile ad hoc networks), VANET includes both V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) and V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) communications, which makes many new promising applications possible on the road. Among these applications, VCC (Vehicular Cloud Computing) is one of the most promising paradigms. VCC, which consists of a group of vehicles instantly cooperating the resources of computing, sensing, communication for decision making on the road, has made a remarkable impact on traffic management and road safety. However, the VCC paradigm is different to the traditional cloud infrastructure and requires a sophisticated approach in terms of security and privacy since the legitimate users and adversaries share the same privileges. The adversaries can exploit the equal access rights and system’s loopholes to endanger the life of passengers or monetize the private data by tampering the onboard infrastructure.

Hence, the main motivation for this special issue is to bring together researchers specialised in security, privacy, cloud computing, and ad hoc networks and service providers, application developers, car manufacturing community, and internet providers to explore the latest understanding and advances in the security and privacy of VCC. The aim of this special issue is to provide the insight into the discussion of the major research challenges and achievements in secure vehicular cloud computing.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Authentication in high-mobility nodes in VCC
• Secure network middleware and protocol design for VCC
• Security trust model and threat models for VCC
• Anonymity techniques in VCC
• Location privacy and validation in VCC
• Commercial and industrial security services in VCC
• Anomaly detection and compromised node revocation in VCC