Future smart cities are predicted to enhance the standard of living, encourage sustainable growth, and enhance the efficiency of city functions. With the increasing number of smart systems being installed, security and privacy have become a top priority and require innovative solutions. Smart cities depend upon stakeholder trust in the city, its services, and service providers. Without stakeholder trust, or with loss of trust, stakeholders will not support services and smart cities lose value. Unrealistic expectations of stakeholders can also render smart city services obsolete.

A distinctive property of smart cities is the integrated deployment of information and communication technology services (ICT) and innovations that manage complicated data in storage devices and during citywide data transmission. Important data that is backed by these technologies may be vulnerable to various types of attacks. The ability to maintain security while maintaining privacy is critical in driving a smart city. Security and privacy concerns affect not only the smart city, but also the individual components that make up the city including buildings, manufacturing, health, education, and public transit systems. Cryptography, access control mechanisms, and innovative security architectures tailored to specific applications all assist in protecting privacy and ensuring compliance with relevant laws and regulations. As a result, security and privacy are critical topics for ICT audiences, particularly those interested in smart city implementation. However, due to their variety, scalability, and dynamic nature, typical cybersecurity protection solutions cannot directly be applied to smart city applications. When developing and implementing new methods or systems, cognizance of security and privacy issues is fundamentally important.

This Special Issue aims to collate original research and review papers focusing on security, privacy and trust in future smart cities.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Security, privacy, and trust requirements of smart cities
• Security and complexity analysis in smart cities
• Formal methods of security, privacy, and trust in smart cities
• Formal verification of trust for smart cities
• Trust models for smart cities
• Algorithms for smart city data, services, and applications
• Security architecture and design of smart cities
• Data anonymity and protection in smart cities
• Trustworthy computing model for smart cities
• Preserving security and privacy of different smart city services and applications
• Security and privacy for networked vehicles
• Trends in botnet activities in IoT-based smart cities
• Threats posed by AI in smart cities
• Role of blockchain-based solution for smart cities
• Machine learning and data mining for security prediction in smart cities