In the past several decades the rapid development of computer systems and networking technologies have made the physical world highly connected and digitized, thus moving many physical systems and processes into the cyber space. The more recent growth of new technologies such as mobile computing, wearable computing, cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), intelligent transport systems (ITS), autonomous and connected vehicles, and augmented/virtual reality have pushed the cyber space to the next level, where cyber and physical worlds become more intermingled and their boundary become more and more blurred.

In cyber-physical systems (CPSs), it is not sufficient to consider the cyber and physical worlds separately, and the dynamic interactions between the two worlds become more critical especially when security and user privacy are of concern, which call for more complicated monitoring, measurement, control, adaptation and protection mechanisms at all levels of the system and its different components. In addition to machines and physical objects (things) involved, humans also play a very most important role in CPSs since such systems are designed to serve humans either directly or indirectly. The involvement of human users in CPSs also lead to concerns on privacy protection as there are often much more avenues to leakage of private information ranging from unintended leakage to more attacking vectors.

When humans are involved, social interactions between human users form part of the complicated cyber-physical world interactions, so understanding the social elements is also very important. One typical example is the concept of social IoT proposed recently, where social networks and IoT networks are connected via human users who cross over both networks thus forming a larger CPS with even more complicated dynamics. Another example is mobile crowdsensing where human users use their mobile devices and/or in-vehicle sensors to participate in collective sensing of the physical world, which often involve a high level of social interactions among human participants who share and consume such information.

Another unique issue around security of human-involved CPSs is that a security flaw or an attack can cause safety risks to human users and/or lead to high financial losses to industry and customers. This can be easily seen from CPSs in application domains such as e-health, transportation, civil engineering, smart grids, and industrial control systems (ICS).

The complexity of ensuring security and privacy in CPSs calls for more research in this area, especially on system-level, human-centric and adaptive techniques which can provide more intelligence and automation while providing human users with better experience, more effective control, and an increased level of situational awareness.

We welcome submissions addressing research problems in the following (but not limited to these) topics:

    Security industrial control systems for CPSs
    Lightweight cryptography for CPSs
    Data security and privacy for CPS
    Authentication and access control for CPS
    Autonomous vehicle security
    Availability, recovery and auditing for CPS
    Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) security
    Self-adaptive techniques for improving security and privacy in CPSs
    Intelligent systems for security and privacy in CPSs
    Optimization of security and privacy solutions for CPSs
    CPS system modelling and simulation for security and privacy purposes
    Cognitive modelling of human users in CPSs for security and privacy purposes
    Human behavioral studies around security and privacy issues of CPSs
    CPS user interfaces for security and privacy purposes
    Security protocols for CPSs
    Privacy enhancing technologies for CPSs
    New attacks to CPSs especially side channel attacks and countermeasures
    Security and privacy risk management of CPSs
    Security and privacy situational awareness in CPSs
    Security and privacy issues around interplay between CPSs and (online) social networks e.g. social IoT networks
    Security and privacy issues around sensor networks including mobile sensors and body sensors
    Security and privacy issues around participatory sensing especially mobile crowdsensing
    Multimedia techniques for improving security and privacy protection of CPSs
    New architectures and platforms for designing more secure CPSs
    New frameworks for analyzing security and privacy issues in CPSs
    Research studying connections between security, privacy, safety and reliability of CPSs
    Security and privacy problems and solutions in ITS (e.g. connected vehicles and traffic sensors)
    Security and privacy problems and solutions in e-health and medical devices (e.g. implanted devices)
    Security and privacy problems and solutions around robots
    Security and privacy problems and solutions in intelligent power and energy systems