Cyber Security of the Continuous Digital Environment: Challenges, Solutions and Future Directions

A special issue of Future Internet (ISSN 1999-5903). This special issue belongs to the section "Cybersecurity".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 March 2020) | Viewed by 11907

Special Issue Editors

R&D Department, The Bonch-Bruevich Saint-Petersburg State University of Telecommunications, 193232 Saint Petersburg, Russia
Interests: Internet of Things (IoT); wireless sensor network (WSN); vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET); vehicle-to-everything (V2X); software-defined networking (SDN); network security
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Department of Applied Mathematics and IT, Saint-Petersburg University of State Fire Service of Emercom of Russia, 196105 Saint Petersburg, Russia
Interests: cyber security; information & network security‎; source code (software); security vulnerability search; Internet of Things

Special Issue Information

Dear colleagues,

The boom of the Internet of Things is evolutionarily leading to the appearance of a continuous digital habitat in many areas of vital human activity (industrial internet, smart home, intelligent transportation system, etc.), together with the new capabilities of broadband networks (5G and beyond) for delivering applications and services anywhere in space.

This technology symbiosis promises a complete digitalization of the economy, opens up enormous commercial opportunities for service providers and applications in all spheres, and creates the conditions for a comfortable life and the absolute mobility of human potential.

However, in addition to the expected benefits, the effect of the Internet of Things globalization generates several major problems at once. One of them is the problem of cyber security.

The Internet of Things is insecure already: there have been many incidents recorded, new attack classes have been detected and the specifics of protecting individual applications have been established, but there are still very few examples of Best Practice, which does not enable the prevention of attacks and random factors with any certainty or guarantee.

However, with a continuous environment, the problem of cyber security becomes much more acute. There, an end-to-end path for the attacker to critical and private data is forming. Before, one required effort and time to penetrate the digital environment, whose perimeter could be protected, now, one a priori becomes an inhabitant of a single environment.

The situation is complicated by factors such as synergy, controlling and standardization.

Firstly, with the integration of various applications and technological platforms of the Internet of Things, the resulting cyber resistance of a single digital environment is almost unpredictable, due to the complex interaction of existing vulnerabilities and the appearance of fundamentally new sources of threats.

Secondly, the question of the degree of management centralization of billions of these sensors is not trivial: it will be some kind of smart device (controller), which will also need to be controlled and which will be the most vulnerable spot in the cyber security system, or the self-governing mechanisms by analogy with nature and society.

Thirdly, local standards can become a serious obstacle on the way to the global Internet of Things, since large-scale operation of the system will require a single language, which should initially be created as safe for the information exchange—such precedents are absent in Best Practice so far.

This is far from a complete list of factors that significantly affect the cyber security of a continuous digital environment.

In these conditions, we need scientific integration of knowledge and breakthrough, including fundamental new approaches of solving the problem of cyber security.

This Special Issue includes conceptual, theoretical and experimental contributions discussing and considering the problems of cyber security which arise in connection with the creation of a continuous digital environment. We invite researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, network operators, and service providers to submit papers describing original previously unpublished work not currently under review by another conference, workshop, or journal.

 Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Cyber Security of the Human Vital Activity Areas (Specificity & Best Practice):
- industrial internet
- smart living places
- smart city
- smart health-care systems
- intelligent transportation systems
- social networks
- augmented reality

Cyber Threats and Cyber Attacks
- taxonomy and classification
- detection
- vulnerabilities

Cyber Security Solutions and Future Directions
- standardization
- integration
- controlling
- forecasting

Security mechanisms
- cryptography
- identification, authentication and authorization
- network security
- control and access delimitation
- steganography

Dr. Andrei Vladyko
Prof. Dr. Mikhail Buinevich
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Future Internet is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • cyber security
  • information & network security
  • Internet of Things
  • smart cities
  • digital environment
  • digital transformation

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

11 pages, 2307 KiB  
Article
Digital Cloud Environment: Present Challenges and Future Forecast
by Serg Mescheryakov, Dmitry Shchemelinin, Konstantin Izrailov and Victor Pokussov
Future Internet 2020, 12(5), 82; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12050082 - 29 Apr 2020
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 4355
Abstract
This article addresses the challenges of a digital cloud environment when it comes to global scalability with a large number of remote servers and an unsecure public cloud, such as Amazon. The goal of the study was to work out an approach for [...] Read more.
This article addresses the challenges of a digital cloud environment when it comes to global scalability with a large number of remote servers and an unsecure public cloud, such as Amazon. The goal of the study was to work out an approach for evaluating the reasonable system capacity under heavy workload. For that purpose, Zabbix monitoring solution is used and business metrics are applied in relation to existing system ones. A prediction data model is proposed to compute the future forecast of the user activity based on the collected historical statistics and to verify whether capacity adjustment is possible or not. The results of capacity planning are implemented at Genesys International Telecommunications Company. System analysis of the production environment indicates the possibility to downscale the capacity of certain virtual servers, which allowed savings to the annual operational costs of $3500 (50%) for each affected server. Full article
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12 pages, 5317 KiB  
Article
Blockchain Behavioral Traffic Model as a Tool to Influence Service IT Security
by Vasiliy Elagin, Anastasia Spirkina, Andrei Levakov and Ilya Belozertsev
Future Internet 2020, 12(4), 68; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12040068 - 15 Apr 2020
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 3618
Abstract
The present article describes the behavioral model of blockchain services; their reliability is confirmed on the basis of experimental data. The authors identify the main technical characteristics and features associated with data transmission through the network. The authors determine the network scheme, working [...] Read more.
The present article describes the behavioral model of blockchain services; their reliability is confirmed on the basis of experimental data. The authors identify the main technical characteristics and features associated with data transmission through the network. The authors determine the network scheme, working with blockchain transactions and the dependence of network characteristics on application parameters. They analyze the application of this model for the detection of the blockchain service and the possibility of the existing security mechanisms of this technology being evaded. Furthermore, the article offers recommendations for hiding the blockchain traffic profile to significantly complicate its identification in the data network. Full article
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15 pages, 2610 KiB  
Article
Steganalysis of Quantization Index Modulation Steganography in G.723.1 Codec
by Zhijun Wu, Rong Li, Panpan Yin and Changliang Li
Future Internet 2020, 12(1), 17; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12010017 - 19 Jan 2020
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3401
Abstract
Steganalysis is used for preventing the illegal use of steganography to ensure the security of network communication through detecting whether or not secret information is hidden in the carrier. This paper presents an approach to detect the quantization index modulation (QIM) of steganography [...] Read more.
Steganalysis is used for preventing the illegal use of steganography to ensure the security of network communication through detecting whether or not secret information is hidden in the carrier. This paper presents an approach to detect the quantization index modulation (QIM) of steganography in G.723.1 based on the analysis of the probability of occurrence of index values before and after steganography and studying the influence of adjacent index values in voice over internet protocol (VoIP). According to the change of index value distribution characteristics, this approach extracts the distribution probability matrix and the transition probability matrix as feature vectors, and uses principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the dimensionality. Through a large amount of sample training, the support vector machine (SVM) is designed as a classifier to detect the QIM steganography. The speech samples with different embedding rates and different durations were tested to verify their impact on the accuracy of the steganalysis. The experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the accuracy and reliability of the steganalysis. Full article
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