Cryptographic Applications in Cloud Computing and Internet of Things

Dear Colleagues,

In the last few months, the paradigm of Cloud Computing has silently proved itself very valuable. It has managed to adapt to higher levels of demands by seamlessly employing more computational power, as most of the world population has resorted to Internet services more than ever before.

Currently, we are on the verge of some very important changes, as the massive deployment of 5G around the world will support mobile and embedded devices (IoT) as they communicate to each other and to servers an unprecedented amount of data. Such a wealth of information could give rise to newer and more refined applications that monitor and analyse, for example, weather changes, road traffic, pollution in urban areas, critical infrastructures, etc. Cloud Computing, Big Data, and IoT will constitute essential parts of the solution for such applications.

At the same time, data gathered by IoT devices will have to be handled in a way that ensures privacy and tamper-resistance. Cryptography could be applied as soon as data are gathered on the vicinity of the source, and the involved client and server sides will have to deal with cryptographic keys, hashes, and newer functionalities. Meaning, a legitimate request could only be allowed to read parts of the encrypted data; some data summarisation function may be necessary to perform on encrypted data. Moreover, data encryption, validation of encrypted data, as well as summarisation functions on encrypted data will have to be analysed in terms of algorithmic complexity in order to be considered viable solutions when applied to Big Data.

Contributions on new approaches, case studies, methodologies, tools, or validation techniques are welcome for this Special Issue. We also welcome review papers that analyse the current state of the art developments in security, privacy, and data management in the Cloud, Big Data, and IoT. Moreover, contributions that analyse distributed applications from the point of view of security, scalability, performance, are welcome.

Prof. Dr. Emiliano Tramontana
Guest Editor

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