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

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

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