Special Issue on Securing the Internet of Things: Challenges, Innovations, and Practical Solutions

IEEE Internet Computing seeks submissions for this upcoming special issue.
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Submissions Due: 10 November 2025

Important Dates

  • Submission Deadline: 10 November 2025
  • Publication: May/June 2026

Call for Papers

As a distinct and rapidly expanding class of Internet infrastructure, the Internet of Things (IoT) connects billions of devices across homes, industries, cities, and critical systems. These devices play vital roles in domains such as healthcare, transportation, energy, and manufacturing, enabling real-time monitoring, automation, and intelligent decision-making. However, the growing scale and ubiquity of IoT deployments have also introduced a complex and evolving attack surface that traditional security solutions are ill-equipped to handle. The security landscape of IoT is characterized by heterogeneity in hardware and software platforms, limited computational resources, and fragmented standards across vendors. Threats can arise from numerous sources, including device misconfigurations, outdated firmware, insecure communication protocols, or malicious interference with sensor data and control logic. Furthermore, IoT systems often operate in untrusted environments, where physical access and environmental manipulation by adversaries are realistic threats. Traditional security mechanisms (typically rule-based, static, and designed for more homogeneous computing environments) struggle to scale effectively in this context.

As IoT becomes deeply embedded in critical infrastructure and everyday life, ensuring its security is no longer optional, it is imperative. There is an urgent need for systematic approaches that can address vulnerabilities across the software, network, and physical layers of IoT systems; detect and respond to anomalies in real time; generate secure configurations for diverse device ecosystems; and ensure resilience against both external and insider threats. This special issue seeks to highlight recent advances in IoT security, with a particular focus on scalable, practical, and cross-layer solutions. We welcome research that addresses foundational challenges as well as emerging threats in real-world IoT deployments.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Security monitoring and anomaly detection in IoT systems
  • Design, synthesis, and enforcement of access control policies for IoT
  • Vulnerability discovery and mitigation in embedded and real-time software
  • Incident detection and response frameworks for IoT environments
  • Automated configuration generation and validation for heterogeneous IoT devices
  • Protocol behavior analysis and secure communication in constrained IoT networks
  • Privacy policy enforcement and compliance in IoT data flows
  • Detection of misinformation or tampered data in sensor and actuator networks
  • Simulation, testing, and evaluation methodologies for IoT security
  • Lightweight, energy-efficient, and scalable defense mechanisms for edge and fog devices
  • Benchmarks, datasets, and reproducibility frameworks for the IoT security community

Guidelines

For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, visit the Author’s Information page. Please submit papers through the IEEE Author Portal and be sure to select the special issue or special section name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts. If requested, abstracts should be sent by email to the guest editors directly.

Manuscripts are subject to peer review on both technical merit and relevance to IC‘s international readership. Submissions must be original manuscripts of fewer than 6,000 words including all text, the abstract, keywords, bibliography, biographies, and 250 words for each figure and table. The abstract should be no more than 150 words and should describe the overall focus of your manuscript. An article should have no more than 20 references. IC does not accept “blanket” citations for general statements, but authors should properly reference concepts, quotations, tables, and artwork taken from other sources. For conference proceedings, we need the title of the article and the proceedings, the name of the proceedings publisher (not the conference’s location), the year of publication, and the pages cited.

In addition to submitting your paper to IEEE Internet Computing, you are also encouraged to upload the data related to your paper to IEEE DataPort. IEEE DataPort is IEEE’s data platform that supports the storage and publishing of datasets while also providing access to thousands of research datasets. Uploading your dataset to IEEE DataPort will strengthen your paper and will support research reproducibility. Your paper and the dataset can be linked, providing a good opportunity for you to increase the number of citations you receive. Data can be uploaded to IEEE DataPort prior to submitting your paper or concurrent with the paper submission.


Guest Editors