The metaverse is rapidly emerging as a transformative digital paradigm that seamlessly blends virtual, physical, and hybrid environments through immersive technologies, artificial intelligence, and advanced networking infrastructures. As metaverse platforms evolve toward large-scale, persistent, and interconnected ecosystems, ensuring security, trust, privacy, and reliability becomes a fundamental prerequisite for sustainable adoption and societal acceptance. Vulnerabilities related to identity theft, data misuse, malicious behaviors, and lack of trust in digital assets and interactions pose significant challenges to both users and service providers. This Special Section, “Secure and Trustworthy Metaverse Systems: Architectures, Protocols, and Applications,” aims to address these challenges by fostering cutting-edge research on secure-by-design metaverse solutions. It brings together theoretical foundations, architectural innovations, protocol designs, and real-world applications that enhance trustworthiness across metaverse infrastructures. Emphasis is placed on interdisciplinary approaches integrating cybersecurity, blockchain, digital twins, AI-driven security intelligence, and next-generation networking technologies. By highlighting secure applications in domains such as healthcare, education, industry, and the digital economy, this Special Section seeks to advance resilient, ethical, and trustworthy metaverse ecosystems that can support future digital societies.

· Metaverse Security

· Trustworthy Metaverse Systems

· Privacy-Preserving Protocols

· Blockchain and Digital Assets

· Digital Twins

· Identity and Access Control

· Secure Architectures

· AI-Driven Security

· Quantum-Safe Metaverse