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Niche Critical Infrastructure (CI), such as water and wastewater systems, manufacturing plants, chemical facilities, maritime operations, and the electrification of transportation fleets, are currently less investigated from the research and operational perspectives and continue to undergo major transformations with the embedding of significantly capable sensing technologies (rendering them cyber-enabled). Such innovative developments and techniques aim at curating and analyzing diverse empirical data and artifacts to generate actionable data-driven inferences and insights. This intends to support accurate control of physical processes and to provision related services while preserving data integrity and systems’ security and safety.

Nevertheless, while such evolving sensing paradigms within CI endeavor transformative implications and benefits, recent realistic events demonstrate that state-sponsored malicious actors and anonymous attackers continue to successfully exploit this paradigm of CI-centric Internet-of-Things (IoT). This causes severe pragmatic consequences on the CI and related associated components. Undoubtedly, this not only undermines the national security of nations, but also catastrophically endangers the fragile economy while also feasibly endangering human-life. To this end, a number of novel challenges arise at the intersection of security and management within such niche critical infrastructure, including, but not limited to, empirical curation and analysis of systems’ artifacts, systems’ provisioning, software and IoT-centric vulnerabilities, and attack modeling and defense. 

The core objective of this Special Issue (SI) is to address developing technical, socio-technical, and public policy security and management matters and issues, which are specifically relevant to niche CI (i.e., less explored and/or newly arising). Niche CI resemble unique technological setups coupled with very specific deployment scenarios and related modus operandi, posing novel, and intriguing security and provisioning challenges. This SI focuses on niche CI, which have been rarely investigated, especially from the empirical perspectives. Given that the nature of CI-relevant research work/issues are not only purely technical, but this also overarches to problems and effects on socio-technical IoT aspects (e.g., human-in-the-loop, cyber-kinetic operations, attacker-system interactions, etc.) and public policy matters (e.g., risk management, data curation, acts, workforce strategies, surveillance, etc.).

Topics of Interest

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Network and security management of IT/OT within niche CIs and related digital twins.
• Planning, designing, and operating IoT-centric CI.
• Novel methods for data collection, analysis, and storage.
• Asset discovery and inventory management.
• Emerging blockchain forensics, monitoring, and analysis in niche CIs.
• Information and communications technology policy.
• IoT-supported argument visualization; interdisciplinary research, learning, and partnering.
• Software Security: CI Information leakage and access control.
• Security for ML; ML for security within niche CI.
• IoT-enabled blockchain solutions for authorization and authentication in CI.
• Continuous cyber-physical situational awareness.
• Attack impact analysis and assessments for resilient niche CI.
• Ethics, policies, and philosophy of science and technology in IoT-centric setups.
• Empirical analysis and modeling of networked-systems and measurement techniques.

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the IEEE Internet of Things Magazine standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Article Submission Guidelines. All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through the magazine’s Manuscript Central site. Select “September 2024 / IoT security and provisioning in cyber-enabled niche critical infrastructure“ from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 30 April 2024 (Extended Deadline)
Authors’ Revision Notification Date: 24 March 2024
Revised Manuscript Submission Deadline: 5 May 2024
Final Decision Notification Date: 30 June 2024
Publication Date: Third Quarter 2024

Guest Editors

Elias Bou-Harb (Lead Guest Editor)
Louisiana State University, USA

Edgar Weippl
University of Vienna, Austria

Chadi Assi
Concordia University, Canada

Martin Husák
Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Jiangshan Yu
Monash University, Australia

Katherine A. Flanigan
Carnegie Mellon University, USA