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Publications

Manuscript Submission Deadline

Special Issue

Call for Papers

Topic Summary

In-depth informatization incurs the explosion of the volumes of data, which results in the emergence and development of smart network systems to tackle the computation and communication overhead and resource management issues. Smart network systems have found numerous applications, i.e., modernized power grids and smart cities, internet of vehicles, intelligent medication, internet of things, etc. As the amount of geographically distributed and logically scattered smart devices grows rapidly in smart network systems, classical centralized protocols may not work anymore or face intractable difficulties in the implementation phase. Fortunately, distributed protocols show great potentials to solve these challenges, which also have the benefits of flexibility, scalability, and robustness. However, with the high penetration of distributed schemes, frequent information exchanges and the stationary information update protocols leave malicious attackers chances to steal the private information through sensitive data analysis or to attack the system by injecting malicious codes to some devices. For example, in distributed machine learning algorithms such as distributed stochastic gradient descent algorithms where multiple servers compute gradients by interacting with the center, internal and/or external attackers can inject false data to local servers to make the learning results infeasible or false. Moreover, with smart metering systems, distributed data aggregation processes make energy consumption of the end-users easily accessible to the utilities or aggregators, and thus users’ private information, such as behaviors, habits, and even beliefs, may be disclosed. Once private information is disclosed to attackers, human privacy rights or essential military secrets can be invaded, which can incur huge losses to individuals or societies. Hence, handling the security and privacy issues of smart network systems is of practical importance and provides motivations for new theoretical studies.

Designing secure and privacy-preserving protocols while guaranteeing the system performance is a challenging and hard matter. First, security and privacy protection schemes cause extra cost such as, for instance, the expenditure for buying new devices, the communication and computation costs due to encryption. Meanwhile, system functionalities may be degraded under privacy masking or security protection strategies, including the accuracy of computation results and the convergence rates of the distributed protocols. Therefore, we are facing great difficulties in addressing how to deal with trade-offs between high security and privacy preservation requirements and low system cost demands, and furthermore to balance the sharp contradiction between security and privacy rights and high-level system function requests. Moreover, heterogeneous security and privacy demands and different individual preferences lead to great complexities in developing efficient algorithms and performing theoretical analysis. Meanwhile, the complex and implicit relations between the exchanged information and the sensitive parameters even make the threat modeling, such as cooperative inference attacks, extremely difficult. This special issue will bring together academic and industrial researchers to identify and discuss technical challenges and recent results related to security and privacy issues of smart network systems.

The topics of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to:

  • Cyber-physical intrusion attack modeling in smart network systems
  • Cooperative inference or data-driven learning theories for smart attacks in smart network systems
  • Novel security and privacy quantitative evaluations for smart network systems
  • Privacy leakage and security measure for different functions and entities
  • Efficient security and privacy preservation for distributed protocols
  • Smart intrusion detection and identification
  • Games among adversarial attacks and trusted distributed participators
  • Resilient decision making under security and privacy constraints
  • Tradeoffs between security and privacy levels and system performances
  • Application-driven adaptive security and privacy preservation distributed scheme design in smart network systems
  • Validation of security and privacy protection methods in real-world applications

Manuscripts may be submitted for rigorous and well-coordinated peer-review process through the Manuscript Central System for IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering.

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors are invited to submit their manuscripts electronically, adhering to the IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering guidelines. Note that the page limit is the same as that of regular papers. Please submit your papers through the online system and be sure to select the special issue name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal. If requested, abstracts should be sent by e-mail to the Guest Editors directly.

Important Dates

Manuscripts Due: 1 May 2020 (Extended Deadline)
First-round Reviews Sent to Authors: 1 July 2020
Revised Manuscripts Due: 15 August 2020
Second-round Reviews Sent to Authors: 1 October 2020
Final Accepted Manuscript Due: 31 October 2020

Guest Editors

Jiming Chen (Lead)
Zhejiang University, China

Hideaki Ishii
Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

Sangheon Pack
Korea University, Korea

Enrico Natalizio
University of Lorraine, France

Rongxing Lu
University of New Brunswick, Canada