In Industrial 4.0 scenarios, such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), smart manufacturing, edge/fog computing environments, etc., many devices and systems are connected to collect, process, and store data, which makes it very difficult to build an effective security strategy due to threats and cyberattacks which may be difficult to identify. The emerging zero-trust model shows great promise for providing Industrial 4.0 security solutions, which holds the “never trust, always verify” principle and can ensure that data and access across the system are strictly verified before granting access.

Zero-trust security can remove physical barriers to IoT security and build virtualized security areas, and is believed to be the best method to approach security in a perimeter-free business environment. Zero-trust offers many security benefits for complex networks and systems. Zero-trust can protect devices and data in the system, speed up anomaly and breach detection, reduce the response time and complexity of the security stack and solve the security skills shortage by introducing machine learning and artificial intelligence. Zero-trust security solutions can enable organizations to obtain security to protect their resources and data and realize substantial business benefits.

This Special Issue aims to collect innovative and high-quality research contributions and foster innovative zero-trust security approaches in complex networks and systems. We welcome original research and review articles.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Zero-trust architecture/framework in industrial environments
• Zero-trust networks and modeling
• Micro-segmentation in complex networks and systems
• Application behavior and visibility
• Zero-trust supply chains
• Access privilege in zero-trust environments
• Autonomic security for zero-trust networks and systems
• Cyberattacks in zero-trust environments
• Zero-trust identity management
• Enterprise zero-trust architecture
• Granular access control and security in zero-trust
• Implementation of zero-trust security
• Machine learning-enabled zero-trust security