Unprecedented use of computer and communication network in our private and professional life gives rise to fraud and malevolence in various forms. These offences may range from simple nuisances aiming at creating chaos and embarrassment to cyber crimes and deadly attacks on critical computing assets. Although security threats are inevitable due to systemic flaws, security failures and casual practices, organizations need to reinforce their security capabilities to remain safe in a borderless and increasingly complex digital world. In the past decades, technical means to counter these security attacks have grown tremendously. Cryptography plays a vital role in designing countermeasures to many of the security attacks. It is widely used for secure data transmission or entity authentication over computer and communication networks. Cryptographic techniques use cryptographic keys that need to be managed and protected effectively such that sensitive information is transmitted securely across the digital networks. The paper, “An Improved Efficient Fault-Tolerant Group Key Agreement Protocol”, by Indu Bala Thingom and Bubu Bhuyan, presents a key management scheme which is resistant to different key and message tampering attacks. The proposal, which is an improvement on an earlier work found elsewhere, claims to be more efficient in terms of computational cost.

Computing technology has undergone a significant evolution over the past decades. Storage devices are becoming smaller and have higher capacities. Processors are becoming very small and more powerful making computing devices tiny. Computing pervades every sphere of life and is available anytime anywhere. It is increasingly destined to serve our on-the-go lifestyle. Further, the shift from server and software to service-based thinking has changed the way computing technology and applications are designed and delivered, thanks to ‘cloud computing’. The development of cloud computing service models promise to offer computing technology more efficiently with affordable cost than ever before transforming the way organizations use it traditionally. However, these advances have created new security challenges, including issues whose full impact is still emerging. The paper, “Binary CD&M Encryption Algorithm for Enhancing Security in Cloud”, by Arshia S Mohammadi and Divya Binish, proposes a new symmetric encryption algorithm. The authors assert that the algorithm is simple, cost-effective and best suitable for data security when size of data is small.

The method of biometric system is preferred over traditional passwords and PIN methods due to several reasons. It is becoming widespread as it uses unique physiological characteristics to identify or authenticate the identity of an individual. Multimodal biometric system is one that utilizes more than one physiological or behavioral characteristic for identification and authentication. It takes the advantages of capabilities of each biometric technology while overcoming the limitations of a single technology. The use of sophisticated multimodal biometric system by border control agencies worldwide is now common due to increasing terrorist activities. It provides more reliable, accurate and fast identification of citizens and foreign travelers. There is a great potential of multimodal biometric products in the coming years.

The paper, “Genetic Algorithm-Based Bacterial Foraging Optimization Watermarking Model for Fingerprint and Palmprint Multimodal Biometric System”, by S Anu H Nair and P Aruna, presents a novel approach for creating a multimodal biometric system. It uses a fusion mechanism and the Genetic Algorithm-Based Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm (GA-Based BFOA) for watermarking of images. According to the authors, the hybrid approach provides better results and survives all attacks on the system.

According to statistics, nearly one in four people worldwide use social network, which translates to around 1.8 billion users. This figure will reach 2.5 billion by 2017 as forecasted elsewhere. The growth of social network audiences in emerging markets of Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa will be huge, making Asia-Pacific the home to the largest social network population worldwide through 2017. Facebook, Twitter, Google and Instagram are the top social networks, on which people of different age groups spend most of their time. Consequently, businesses and marketers love social media. There has been considerable growth in digital journalism on the Internet. However, the rapid growth of social media will revolutionize digital journalism as the reachability of social media is unprecedented. The paper, “Social Media as a New Trend in Sri Lankan Digital Journalism: A Study”, by S Thuseethan and S Vasanthapriyan, presents a study that explores the new trend in digital journalism. It tries to understand the effectiveness of social media as news media with the explosive growth of social media users.

E-commerce provides new channels for businesses and individuals for buying and selling. It is growing and will continue to grow in size and technical sophistication. Mobile agents are software entities which represent buyers and sellers who move from one marketplace to another on the Internet. Mobile agent technology is very promising for e-commerce applications and will revolutionize the way we buy and sell. However, the technology comes with associated security issues. The paper, “A Review of Security Issues in Mobile Agent-Based E-Commerce”, by Ananta Charan Ojha, provides a lucid review of this subject. It presents a categorization of security issues, analyzes requirements for security and presents the available countermeasures for mobile agents-based e-commerce.

Finally, the paper, “A Comparative Study of Histogram Shifting, Reversible Contrast Mapping and Difference Expansion Methods”, by Navnath S Narawade and Rajendra D Kanphade, presents a comparative study of three different algorithms for reversible watermarking and finds their suitability for different categories of images.

-- A C Ojha
Consulting Editor