Security and privacy of smart-X systems

Smart-X is a combination of existing smart technologies that can solve various real-time problems. It is also an emerging trend that can be viewed to be slightly disruptive. There are several technological and regulatory challenges to be addressed. The most important of them are data ownership, security, privacy, and information sharing. The security and privacy issues of the underlying technologies used are carried over to Smart-X systems (Fabisiak 2018). Privacy is a serious concern with IoT technologies. WSN systems have their fair share of flaws in the security aspect. These chinks in the armour have to be ironed out before the technologies can be reliably used as a part of smart X systems. Conclusively, one can confidently state that Smart X is still striding away from being implementable in smart cities and smart grids as a standalone system (Khatwani and Srivastava 2018). These motivations have attracted significant attention recently. In this special issue, we focus on the Security and Privacy of Smart-X Systems, addressing both original algorithmic development and new applications (Zhang, Mouritsen, and Miller 2019). By bringing together original contributions of leading researchers and practitioners from academia as well as industry, we have solicited seven papers for publication after a rigorous peerreview process. They address a wide range of theoretical and application issues in this domain. An integrative perspective of this special issue is provided here by summarising each contribution contained therein. As a massive coordinated attack on the availability of services through many compromised systems, distributed denial of service (DDoS) flooding attack has become one of the critical challenges to security professionals. To defend against DDoS attack along with maintaining Quality of Service (QoS) for legitimate users, a policy-based network management (PBNM) strategy has been proposed by Dahiya and Gupta. The strategy is used to enable users to negotiate with the service provider dynamically on cost and types of services. With the expanding range of channels for customers to acquire products, the Smart-X system plays an essential role in pricing strategies in that fairness concerns could significantly impact the price. If customers in the BM store have concerns, the firm is induced to lower product prices in stores, leading to total profit reduction. Meanwhile, it is better for the firm to operate in dual channels when customers do not have fairness concerns. Through comparison among three models with or without customers’ fairness concerns, security and privacy concerns, L. Yang et al. researched how to examine the impacts of customers’ fairness concerns on the firm’s optimal pricing strategy as well as total profit. It is also vital to investigate the impact of privacy concerns on purchasing decisions of customers and pricing strategies of service providers in Smart-X systems. S. Dong et al. develop profit maximisation models to test purchasing decisions and pricing strategies of advanced and basic services in monopoly and competitive markets. It is found that each service provider’s pricing decision and their relative market position are determined by ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS 2022, VOL. 16, NO. 3, 403–405 https://doi.org/10.1080/17517575.2021.1923066