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Special Issue on Secure Communication, Sensing, and Computation in Future Intelligent Wireless Networks
Submission Date: 2025-07-15

We are at a pivotal moment in defining what the sixth generation (6G) of wireless networks will be. Many promising new technologies have recently been proposed, ranging from the integration of sensing and communication capabilities to the deployment of reconfigurable antennas/elements, and from the adoption of machine learning (ML)-based designs to the integration of higher frequency bands, including millimeter wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz) bands. While these exciting new technologies promise significant performance gains and offer new services and opportunities for 6G, they also introduce new security and privacy risks and attack surfaces that are of paramount concern and can even be a dealbreaker for some of these technologies. 

With emerging technologies such as intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS)/reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), holographic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), and extremely large-scale arrays (XL-array), electromagnetic wave propagation will shift from the traditional far-field model to the near-field model. This shift introduces new security issues in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), such as increased susceptibility to eavesdropping due to higher spatial resolution and more precise jamming attacks targeting specific users or devices. In parallel, there is a significant move towards integrating ML-based solutions for future network designs; however, these come with associated risks in terms of the reliability and robustness of these models (e.g., against adversarial attacks), the privacy and security of data used in training, as well as the security of the models themselves. Another promising solution considered in 6G is semantic communications, where the meaning and intent behind raw data are transmitted, necessitating considerations of feature privacy and security. Moreover, a common solution approach for semantic communication relies on joint source-channel coding, which introduces new security risks due to the correlation between transmitted signals and the underlying data to be conveyed. It is clear that each of these new advancements comes with its own security challenges and vulnerabilities across communication, sensing, and computation layers, necessitating robust and comprehensive security measures. The real benefits of these technologies can only be fully assessed when considered alongside the associated multilayered security risks and collaborative mitigation strategies across all physical and application layers. On the other hand, new developments in ML techniques provide new capabilities for various security solutions that can be incorporated into future network designs. 

In this context, this special issue will focus on security issues in future intelligent networks, including aspects of sensing and communication, semantic communications, artificial intelligence (AI)-native design of network components, as well as the privacy and security risks of AI services over wireless networks. Our goal is to attract novel research works that highlight such non-trivial security risks, propose rigorous solution approaches, and evaluate the pros and cons of emerging technologies in light of these security vulnerabilities. We solicit high-quality original research papers on topics including, but not limited to:

    Security and privacy issues in positioning and sensing systems
    IRS/RIS-aided anti-detection for secure sensing and communication
    Data and model privacy in ML solutions for wireless systems
    Security of ML-aided designs for future communication networks
    Data and model poisoning attacks in federated/distributed learning over wireless networks
    Security in semantic-based joint source-channel coding solution
    Algorithm and hardware design for secure ISAC systems
    ML-aided covert communication and anti-detection techniques
    ML-aided jamming detection and anti-jamming techniques
    Secure near-field communication and sensing systems
    Secure integrated air-to-ground systems
    Resource management to guarantee security
    Secure mmWave and THz systems
    Information-theoretic analysis of security in sensing/ISAC
    Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless secure transmission
    IRS/RIS-assisted secure transmission and secret key generation
    Reconfigurable antenna technologies, e.g., fluid antenna system (FAS), movable antenna (MA), and rotatable antenna (RA), for secure transmission and sensing
    Other advanced MIMO techniques, e.g., holographic MIMO, and XL-array, for secure transmission and sensing
    Experimental testbeds for secure XL-array/ISAC systems
    Secret key generation over near-field communication
    Differential privacy for federated/distributed learning over wireless networks
    Quantum entanglement and post-quantum AI for secure ISAC

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors should submit their manuscripts following the IEEE JSAC guidelines. Authors should submit a PDF version of their complete manuscript through Scholar One Manuscripts (authors should have an account on the platform).

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 15 July 2025
First Notification: 1 November 2025
Acceptance Notification: 31 January 2026
Final Manuscript Due: 20 February 2026
Publication Date: Second Quarter 2026

Guest Editors

Beixiong Zheng
South China University of Technology, China

Deniz Gündüz
Imperial College London, UK

Ruiqi (Richie) Liu
ZTE Corporation, China

Jemin Lee
Yonsei University, South Korea

Si-Hyeon Lee
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea

Georges Kaddoum
École de Technologie Supérieure, Canada

Onur Günlü
Linköping University, Sweden