Guest Editorial: Security and Privacy Issues in Industry 4.0 Applications

The papers in this special section focus on security and privacy issues associated with Industry 4.0. In 2011, a group of delegates from business and academia, and politics in German initially proposed the conception of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or Industry 4.0), which aims to improve the competitive ability in the manufacturing industry of their country. Along with the emergence of the Industry 4.0 term, people started introspecting the existing shortcomings in contemporary industrial society. Especially, the technologies of the past generations cannot maintain data explosive requirements in the Internet and telecommunication industry and fuse real-time data, which would increase waste and reduce productivity and overall equipment effectiveness. Industry 4.0 recognizes the importance of this issue and makes full use of large-scale machine-to-machine communication and the Internet of things (IoT) to increase automation, improve communication, and self-monitoring and diagnose issues without human intervention, finally transforming traditional manufacturing and industrial practices into a modern smart organization. However, with the rapid growth of devices, security and privacy issues rise to the surface. A mass amount of data frequently exchanged in the public channel will draw the attention of some people with evil intentions. Moreover, the resource-limited devices without strong cryptographic assurance would be compromised and hacked by adversaries. Hence, assuring the authenticity, integrity, and nonrepudiation of these industrial IoT data is a hot issue for industry 4.0 at present.