New Challenges in Cyber Security

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, advances in the field of networking, communication and computation have led people to adopt distributed methods/resources for performing large-scale data processing, redefine the computing paradigm, and also focus on cyber security. The essential design objective of the current data processing framework is to build a unified, integrated, and holistic computing system that can efficiently and effectively organize and utilize diverse computing resources, ranging from computing powers in cloud centers to a sea of spare mobile end resources. The emergence of such an integrated system brings forward a unique network, where computing can be performed anytime, and anywhere and be initialized by anyone. For example, residents may request deep learning models for local business services, where the model could be jointly trained by mobile phones and laptops owned by local citizens, embedded computing units in public facilities and smart vehicles, as well as by edge and cloud servers by collecting training datasets.

However, this trend of adopting such novel computing paradigms and frameworks also brings unprecedented challenges in cyber security. Malicious individuals can conduct seamless and combinatorial attacks on heterogeneous devices deployed in extensively wide ranges. Potentially vulnerable devices include central servers, edge nodes, mobile devices and small Internet-of-Things gadgets. These devices have varied levels of robustness, availability, accessibility, and controllability; therefore, the current unified design for each device is impractical. Moreover, corresponding data and information for processing are also distributed and stored on multiple devices and device owners, which further aggravates cyber security issues, making it an integrated, sophisticated and long-lasting task. Generally, the protection of cyber security remains unsettled, despite the remarkable benefits brought by the generalized computing framework.

Therefore, this Special Issue solicits all categories of original studies and novel solutions which are required for handling novel challenges in cyber security in the upcoming unified computing paradigm, including novel theories, frameworks, techniques, and applications.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• New fundamental architectures and frameworks for cyber security;
• Novel theories and techniques on vulnerability detection;
• Novel theories and techniques on encryption and decryption;
• Novel theories and techniques on authentication and access control;
• Secure data collection and aggregation mechanisms in distributed systems;
• Novel techniques for secure communication;
• Novel techniques and analysis for data privacy;
• Novel secure and efficient edge computing techniques;
• Secure and efficient data processing mechanisms in cloud–edge–terminal systems;
• Secure and in-network data processing mechanisms in the hybrid Internet of Things;
• Novel frameworks and techniques on federated learning;
• Novel deep learning models for cyber security;
• Novel demos, applications, and systems for cyber security.

Dr. Zhipeng Cai
Dr. Sai Akshita Maradapu Vera Venkata
Dr. Zuobin Xiong
Dr. Tuo Shi
Guest Editors

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• cyber security
• security and privacy
• distributed data processing
• internet of things
• edge computing