Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming increasingly prevalent in our society, as the backbone of interconnected smart homes, smart hospitals, smart cities, and a variety of other smart environments. When IoT meets 5G communications, which aims at utilizing many promising network technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cognitive Computing, massive Machine Type of Communication (mMTC), Cloud Computing, etc., to support a huge number of connected devices, it can be envisioned that tremendous challenges for security, privacy and trust will be encountered.

To address the security concerns, firstly, secure network architectures, mechanisms, and protocols are required as the basis for 5G-oriented IoT, following the security-by-design but also the security-by-operation rules. Furthermore, as in 5G networks even more user data and network traffic will be transferred, the big data security solutions assisted by AI techniques should be sought in order to address the magnitude of the data volume and to ensure security concerns at stake. When cloud computing and cloud radio access networks (CRAN) are integrated with IoT in 5G-enabled smart cities to extend the massive terminals’ computation capability and enhance energy efficiency, centralized processing mode brings more challenges to security and user privacy. Despite the fact that edge-computing-based servers are now capable of extracting meaningful analytics from IoT nodes, which is critical for smart traffic or Internet of Vehicles (IoV), there are growing concerns regarding the privacy of data providers when they grant edge applications direct access to their embedded sensors. Therefore, both privacy regulators, 5G users, and industrial stakeholders started to see the urgent need to promote research advancement in security and privacy-preserving technologies that aim to provide efficient information protection for 5G-oriented IoT processing technologies.

With these challenges in mind, this Special Issue expects to promote cutting-edge research that focuses on various topics that are related to security and privacy protection for 5G-enabled IoT. Original research and review articles are welcome.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Secure aggregation and computation in 5G-enabled IoT
• Security/privacy protocol for Big data exchange in IoT
• Privacy-preserving data analytics in 5G-enabled IoT
• Machine learning, deep learning and federated learning in 5G-enabled IoT
• Cloud computing and edge computing in 5G-enabled IoT
• Block chain for security and privacy protection in 5G-enabled IoT
• New security/privacy framework for 5G-enabled IoT
• System design of industrial IoT for resiliency, reliability, and security
• AI-based approach for enhancing IoT security
• Security and privacy assessment over existing IoT systems/platforms