Mobile devices are going to take a central role in the emerging Internet of Everything era. With the proliferation of wireless technologies (e.g. LTE, LTE-A, WiMAX, 5G, Bluetooth, ZigBee, ZWave, NB-IoT and LoRaWAN), various kinds of mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, wearable watches, smart vehicle) have come into our daily lives and are able to provide continuous and reliable connectivity, facilitating a wide variety of online services such as e-commerce, e-healthcare, and e-home. However, the large-scale deployment of smart mobile devices is confronted with many new challenges. Especially in terms of security and privacy, due to the fact that these devices have different characteristics from traditional personal computers, servers, and laptops.

Smart mobile devices are generally of limited computation capability and restricted storage and energy, and thus adopting security and privacy solutions that employ expensive cryptographic primitives will not be practical. Meanwhile, smart mobile devices are typically small devices with a restricted screen, keyboard and interfaces. Consequently, existing security and privacy solutions may not be sufficiently user-friendly or completely unviable. In addition, smart mobile devices are often capable of transparently monitoring many sensitive activities and data of users’ lives (e.g., location, health, preference and correspondence), and hence more stringent security and privacy demands are required than that of traditional computing devices. This explains why the security risks on smart mobile devices have been greatly increased both in the number of reported security incidents and in a certain degree of severity.

The aim of this Special Issue is to bring together original research articles and review articles from researchers and practitioners working in the broad area of security and privacy. We seek high-quality articles presenting state-of-the-art security and privacy research including attacks, mechanisms, frameworks, protocols, algorithms, policies, user studies as well as threat models for mobile devices.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Access control and authentication for smart mobile devices
• Measurement of privacy leakage for smart mobile devices
• Data privacy for smart mobile devices Information leakage detection and prediction for smart mobile devices
• Privacy-enhancing technologies for smart mobile devices
• New security and privacy paradigms for smart mobile devices
• Attacks on security and privacy mechanisms for smart mobile devices
• Human aspects in security and privacy for smart mobile devices
• Foundational principles for lightweight security and privacy
• Evaluation metrics for security and privacy on smart mobile devices
• Key management for security and privacy on smart mobile devices
• Identity and access management in the Internet of Things
• Measurement of privacy leakage in the Internet of Things
• Multi-factor authentication for smart mobile devices
• Continuous/implicit authentication for smart mobile devices