This editorial introduces the four articles published in Volume 2, Issue 2 of the Journal of Reliable and Secure Computing, covering sustainable blockchain architectures, federated learning with large language models at the edge, and cryptanalysis of authentication protocols for maritime and drone environments. More >

Recently, Zahednejad and Gao (2025 Journal of Information Security and Applications, Elsevier, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104083,) identified key compromise impersonation (KCI) in both, a two-factor, and a three-factor authentication protocols for IoT devices. They further proposed a lightweight authentication scheme designed to mitigate the identified KCI threats. Subsequently, Zhang et al. (2025, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2025.3599678) introduced a chaotic map-based authentication protocol for the Internet of Drones, claiming that their design is resilient to a wide range of security attacks. Earlier, Kumari et al. (2019)... More >

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet their deployment is hindered by data, computation, and privacy constraints. Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising solution by enabling collaborative, privacy-preserving training across distributed devices, while the push for low-latency on-device intelligence further drives LLM integration into FL and edge settings—posing new challenges in heterogeneity and resource limits. This survey comprehensively reviews the integration of LLMs with federated learning, termed FLM, and its deployment at the edge, with particular emphasis on the robustness, privacy, and trustworthiness challenges that emerge across th... More >

With the rapid development of edge computing and intelligent maritime transportation systems, secure authentication and key agreement protocols have become essential for protecting communications among maritime entities and edge devices. Recently, Mahmood et al. proposed an authentication protocol for edge-centric maritime transportation systems, claiming that their scheme can resist various security attacks while ensuring efficient communication. However, practical maritime environments still face many security threats. In addition, edge infrastructures usually have limited resources. Therefore, authentication protocols require rigorous security evaluation. In this paper, we perform a crypt... More >

Blockchain technology offers transformative potential across distributed computing domains; however, dominant consensus mechanisms such as Proof of Work (PoW) impose severe energy and carbon costs, and existing research addresses only isolated components—consensus, storage, or sharding—rather than the full architectural system. This paper introduces the Energy-Optimized Blockchain Architecture (EOBA), the first nine-layer framework in which energy awareness is a foundational, cross-cutting design principle embedded across all architectural layers. EOBA integrates energy monitoring, hybrid energy-aware consensus, energy-guided task scheduling, dynamic sharding, hybrid on-chain/off-chain s... More >