With the increasing development of informational, communication, and computer technologies, integrating the cyber world and physical world together, cyberphysical systems (CPS), also referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT), have attracted increasing attention from academia and industry. As the extension of the CPS/IoT, cyberphysical-social systems (CPSS) include the cyber world, physical world, and social world and their integrations such as the CPS/IoT (the integration of the cyber world and physical world), the social computing (the integration of the cyber world and the social world), and even the integration of all three worlds. The cyber space mainly contains discrete and logical data such as the computation, communication, and control information, which are in the form of “0” and “1.” The physical space is the natural and human-made space, governed by physical laws, and operates in continuous time. The social space consists of human and social relationships, the aim of which is to describe the thoughts, action, mind, sense, interaction, and communication of human beings.

The ultimate goal of CPSS is to provide proactive and personal services for humans. Accordingly, one of the most important concerns of CPSS is to protect sensitive or private data, guarantee user privacy, and ensure the system’s trustworthiness. CPSS security, privacy, and trust, as a new research and development field, require further development and advances in the corresponding models and methodologies for effective connections among physical, cyber, and social worlds.

This special issue will specifically focus on the most recent progress of researches on security, privacy, and trust problems of CPSS. Readers can learn and understand a broad range of topics and specialties in security, privacy, and trust over cyberphysical-social systems (CPSS), from fundamentals and theories to practical aspects. For example, CPSS data security cares about three security elements (confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity) of data while CPSS system security further cares about the secure and trustworthy connections among three spaces involving one or two components of cyberphysical-social systems. This means we focus not only on data security and user privacy, but also on secure computations and communications, as well as on system and hardware trust.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Preserving privacy
• Efficient cryptography for smart devices
• Authentication for IoT users
• Secure CPSS communications
• Securing CPSS data
• Intelligent security
• Key management in heterogeneous systems
• Accountability
• Anonymity
• Resilient CPSS architecture
• Physical security
• Trust management
• Audit and provenance management
• Security protection in edge computing
• Privacy and privacy-preserving technical solutions for smart cities
• Security protection in big data processing
• Security protection in CPSS service
• Security protection in data mining