Decentralized distributed systems eliminate the biggest problem - a single point of failure in centralized networks - with the facilitation of multiple owners. Very recently, the increased interest in privacy-driven distributed computations has necessitated greater scrutiny of the security and optimality of these distributions. The need to solve computationally intensive problems has resulted in significant research and investment in the field of distributed computing, especially targeting smart mobile Internet of Things (IoT). Furthermore, the increased presence of portable smart devices, coupled with the explosive growth in computing power, offers an untapped resource for these computations. Importantly, Blockchain technology is an elegant example of distributed computation which decentralizes information. There is no doubt that the implications of blockchain for distributed systems are of profound influence.

This Special Issue aims to benefit the research community with a collection of articles emphasizing the challenges and solutions to “Distributed secure computing for smart mobile IoT networks”. This Special Issue will also focus on state-of-the-art fast and efficient privacy-enhancing techniques for achieving secure distributed computations in IoT networks. Issues such as how to compute on encrypted data for IoT networks, how to verify computation in outsourced environments, how to keep the data privacy for IoT networks under machine learning techniques, how to achieve password-based authentication in distributed environments, and how to guarantee the data privacy in blockchain and smart contract will be covered. We welcome both original research articles as well as review articles discussing the current state of the art.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Secure computation and query on encrypted data in smart mobile IoT
• Verifiable computation in outsourced environments in IoT
• User authentication and authorization for IoT devices
• Privacy-enhancing technologies for distributed environments
• Encrypted machine learning and secure multiparty computation in IoT
• Privacy-preserving Machine Learning in smart mobile IoT networks
• Searchable encryption in IoT databases
• IoT security and privacy
• Security for mobile-IoT services and applications
• Secure multiparty computation in smart mobile IoT networks
• Security for 4G and 5G-enabled IoT networks
• Secure computation outsourcing in IoT
• Private and verifiable smart contracts for Blockchains
• Distributed key generation with smart contracts
• Privacy-preserving smart contracts
• Secure storing of secret keys for Blockchain wallet
• Secure authentication for Blockchain wallet
• Threshold-optimal signatures and applications to Blockchain wallet
• Various applications atop Blockchain, such as e-voting and e-action