Blockchain technology has emerged as a novel distributed ledger technology (DLT) that facilitates data sharing and system management in a secure and efficient manner without the intervention of a central authority. Leveraging blockchain characteristics, industrial stakeholders and the research community have shown an increasing interest in deploying this technology in several fields including healthcare, finance, IoT-based applications, supply chains, digital copyright management, and so on.

Blockchain technology is paving the way for emerging new data management systems. Indeed, this new technology has significantly changed the way of data access, storage, retrieval, and information sharing. It presents many fundamental research challenges for the management of data in blockchain. Moreover, distributed trust, and therefore security and privacy, is at the core of the blockchain technologies and has the potential to provide new cybersecurity mechanisms for today’s systems.

This Special Issue aims to collect the most relevant ongoing research efforts and to share knowledge and results in theory, methodology, and applications of blockchain for systems management and cybersecurity, including data storage security management, transaction management, security, access control, and privacy. We encourage papers that apply ideas and techniques from different areas to understand the problems and challenges in blockchain. We also welcome papers that report novel systems and application concerns about blockchain, systems management, and cybersecurity. Original research and review articles are welcome.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Blockchain for cybersecurity
• Blockchain for systems managements
• Blockchain for data sharing
• Blockchain for trust management
• Blockchain for decentralized systems and applications
• Platforms for decentralized consensus (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, Ripple, Open Blockchain, etc.)
• New threat models and attacks on existing blockchain technologies
• Defences and countermeasures for blockchain technologies
• Blockchain for IoT applications
• Smart contract and distributed ledger
• Innovative applications driven by Blockchain
• Industrial data access secure control based on blockchain
• Privacy-enhancing models and technologies