A Summary of the Special Issue "Cybersecurity and Cryptography"

Nowadays in the cyber world, massive amounts of data are being collected, transmitted, and stored by different organizations and individuals. As an important asset, data must be well protected in storage and during transmission. Data security is a crucial factor to the success of new information technologies and infrastructures, such as Cloud Computing and Big Data. This Special Issue includes seven research articles presenting new findings and technologies in the area of cybersecurity and cryptography. The recent emergence of the targeted use of malware in cyber espionage urges a systematic review for better understanding its impact and mechanism. In the paper " The Role of Malware in Reported Cyber Espionage: A Review of the Impact and Mechanism " [1], Wangen proposed a basic taxonomy to document major cyber espionage incidents, describing and comparing their impacts and their mechanisms. The proposed taxonomy provides not only a solid foundation of knowledge about the topic, but also a systematic way to document known and future attacks to facilitate research activities. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is widely used in supply chain management. In the paper " Efficiency and Privacy Enhancement for a Track and Trace System of RFID-Based Supply Chains " [2], Chen et al. investigated the security and privacy issues in RFID-based track and trace systems. They first studied the relationship among three different security concepts proposed in the literature—namely privacy, path unlinkability, and tag unlinkability—and proved that privacy is equivalent to path unlinkability, and tag unlinkability implies privacy. Moreover, they proposed an efficient track and trace scheme named Tracker+, which incurs less computation and storage overhead, compared with other schemes of the same type proposed in the literature.