Looking at the vast majority of modern centralized cloud-based infrastructures and services, including those handling data generated by smart sensors and, more generally, by connected personal devices (the “things“ of the Internet of Things, IoT, paradigm), we realize that they require unreasonable amounts of trust to be placed upon third-party authorities. This fact is essentially leading to the impingement of users' privacy and could even open the doors to not-so-conspiratorial mass-surveillance programs. In an economy driven by digital data, the users through whom the massive volume of data is generated, surrender their data to centralized entities and do not stand to reap any of the economic benefits.

In this context, decentralized and trustless solutions represent the need of the hour. It follows the importance of fundamentally rethinking how the problems associated with centralized infrastructures can be solved, and how to develop new means of decentralizing the entire end-to-end technological stack, also conceiving smarter and more autonomous sensors. Towards this goal, blockchains and relevant distributed ledger technologies are currently seen as a promising instrument to implement decentralized frameworks. However, this branch of research is nascent and there are still some steep challenges to be solved.

This Special Issue is an invitation to researchers who are investigating blockchains and their applications for securing and decentralizing sensor-oriented devices and deployments in the most general meaning (smart sensors, wireless sensor networks, cyber-physical systems, crowdsourcing data, etc.). Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Blockchains for cyber-physical systems and wireless sensor networks;
- Efficient consensus algorithms for blockchains for smart sensors and IoT devices;
- Enabling sensors to interact with blockchains and distributed ledger technologies;
- Blockchain-based business models for autonomous sensors;
- Blockchains for sensor data crowdsourcing;
- Blockchains for data monetization of sensor data;
- Blockchain performance optimization for multiple IoT verticals;
- Blockchain-based sensor/IoT device identity management, authentication, and authorization;
- Blockchains for IoT/sensor device hardware security;
- Blockchains for securing the IoT edge.

This is a special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220) belonging to the section "Intelligent Sensors". The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open-access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Feature//invited papers can be published free-of-charge, but interested contributors should get in contact with the guest editors before submitting this kind of contribution.

Assoc.

Guest Editors: Profs. Massimo Vecchio and Salil Kanhere