Rapid advances in wireless technologies (e.g., LTE, LTE-A, WiMAX, 3G, Bluetooth, ZigBee, Z-Wave, and LoRaWAN) have partly contributed to the proliferation of smart mobile devices (e.g., sensors), unmanned vehicles, wearable and embedded devices, and so on. The amount and nature of communications and transactions on such devices and the underpinning systems require a secure and effective authentication mechanism to prevent unauthorized access from illegitimate entities (including both devices and users). Authentication has been widely deployed to prevent unauthorized access and, in many cases, is also the primary line of defense. A large number of authenticationmechanisms and schemes exist for conventional systems, but they may not be suitable for the smart mobile computing paradigm. Firstly, smart mobile devices generally have limited computation and storage and energy capabilities (in comparison to servers, personal computers and laptops), and thus deploying authentication schemes that employ expensive cryptographic primitives will not be viable. Secondly, smart mobile devices are typically small devices with a small screen, keyboard, and so forth, and thus existing authentication schemes may not be sufficiently user-friendly. Thirdly, smart mobile devices often deal with sensitive applications, activities, and data (e.g., location, preferences, and physical condition), and thus privacy demands are much more stringent than traditional authentication schemes. Consequently, it is necessary to perform a critical rethink the way we perform authentication for smart mobile devices and promote new methods that are both robust and easy to use, in order to minimize impact on the user’s primary task. This special issue aims to provide a forum for researchers to publish and exchange their recent research ideas and results about authentication on smart mobile devices. The following 20 papers were selected for inclusion in this special issue after several rounds of reviews by experts in the respective domains.The topics covered in the accepted papers range from attacks against fingerprint sensor hardware, biometric template protection, privacy-preserving message authentication, new lightweight cryptographic primitives (e.g., random number generation and oblivious transfer from lattice-based cryptography) for authentication, to various authentication schemes (one-factor, two-factor, and three-factor) designed for varied specific environments (such as Cloud, RFID, Vehicular, and Wireless Sensor Networks).