Emerging Applications of Information Security Technology in Digital Environment

Dear Colleagues, 

Recent advancements in digital technologies that are the substantial infrastructure of every business are also considered a cause of concern for many business owners and decision-makers. These massive shifts in technology and its applications that are aligned with tremendous impacts on the quality of our lives are not free from information security and cyber threats issues. Since systems are getting excessively dependent on complex digital technologies, protecting the systems from cyber-attacks and fraud is playing an integral role to make the most out of recent changes in the digital environment. Improvement in information security systems can be an achievable objective in case of applying emerging technologies in user-behavior analytics, deep learning, cloud, hardware authentication, and data loss prevention.

Deployment of data-driven tools that are based on user-behavior analytics can mitigate the risk of penetration to systems to a great extent. Appropriate implementation of user-behavior analytics is considered an effective approach to indicate any attack to systems while analyzing a user's present behavior and comparing it to find any nonconformity in behavior. Also, deep learning, which is originally based on artificial intelligence and machine learning, has been proven to be used efficiently for information security purposes. Improvements in DL and its applications not only help to realize users’ malicious behavior by imitating and learning users’ way of thinking but also enable enterprises to look at every micro or macro entity and detect any type of anomaly. Another technology that is worthwhile to concentrate on in order to minimize the risk of cyber-attacks is the implementation of secure cloud services for enterprises that have intentions to accelerate their digital transformation by relying on the cloud. In addition, ideal improvement expectations in information security, hardware authentication, tokenism, and encryption technologies are noted as the most immediate applications. A combination of simple-but-powerful features and designing different security mechanisms to log in can be fruitful to verify users’ identity and prevent the likelihood of monetizing data in case of a successful breach.

Aforementioned emerging technologies and applications in information security are our main focus in this Special Issue. Topics include but are not limited to the following:

• AI-Based Software Engineering
• Anonymity and Privacy
• Authentication and Access Control
• Behavioral Information Security and Information Assurance
• Behavioral, Cognitive and Motivational Aspects of Human and Technology Interaction
• Cloud Applications
• Cloud Architecture/Modeling, Services
• Cloud Security
• Cryptographic Protection
• Data Mining/Web Mining
• Digital Forensics
• E-Services
• Human Factors in Security
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Intelligent Systems
• Machine Learning Methods 
• Multimedia Security
• Natural Language Processing
• Network and Mobile Security
• Neural Networks
• Privacy, Security and Trust Management
• Security Management and Policies
• Social Computing and Social Intelligence
• Vision and Speech Perception

Dr. Hamed Taherdoost
Dr. Seyed Reza Shahamiri
Dr. Kamaljeet Sandhu
Dr. Basit Qureshi
Dr. Hazra Imran
Dr. Salimur Choudhury
Guest Editors

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