Bio‐inspired and cognitive approaches in cryptography and security applications
Marek R. Ogiela, Hoon Ko · Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience · 2017
The modern solutions in Internet technologies like IoT, Cloud, and Pervasive computing, as well as new computation approaches are due to the rapid development of the critical infrastructure and also different methods, providing the secure communication between remoted peers. Recent progress in ubiquitous computing is made possible, thanks to the application of the cutting edge achievements in soft computing, cognitive information systems, and a number of other techniques like ambient intelligence, human-centered computing, bio-inspired computation, etc. Recently, such methods have had a great importance and made it possible to intelligently analyze and perform analytics research in a great amount of complex data (Big Data) as well as manage in secure manner the data transmissions over global communication networks, which also contributing to the development of pervasive and mobile computing (Edge, Fog, and Cloud Computing). The possibility of further development and application of such technology will be dependent on many factors like designing new generation information systems, application of innovative security models for global communication, services management in ubiquitous computing, etc. It may also be dependent on analysis of context around the systems, and the methods of communication, providing a high level of security of the transmitted and aggregated data originating from various places or sensors. These subjects, as well as a number of others, like the innovative and secure applications, as well as the ways of using biologically inspired and cognitive procedures, computational models and secure communication protocols, smart services, or pervasive computing will form the subject of this Special Issue on “Bio-inspired and cognitive approaches in cryptography and security applications” in the Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience Journal. To this Special Issue, seven articles of particular interest were selected, as they present the most interesting researches within the subject matter of this special issue. The paper “An Acceleration of Quasigroup Operations by Residue Arithmetic” by P. Kromer, J. Platos, J. Nowakova, and V. Snasel1 presents novel solutions in efficient implementation of quasigroup operations for cryptographic procedures. Residue number systems allow to implement a fast and concurrent realization of addition and multiplication operations, which in this work, were used to accelerate quasigroup operations and create an efficient computational approach to their implementation, designed with respect to the extended instruction sets of modern processors. The paper entitled “Humanics Information Security” by M. Nishigaki2 presents an innovative studies on so-called “humanics information security,” in which the author tries to develop technologies, which ensure both security and usability, by combining the power of humans' cognitive and psychological characteristics. These studies focused mainly on user authentication and captcha enhanced with humanics information security. The image-based authentication, using cognitive aspects such as experiential knowledge and schema, can make the user authentication easy and tolerant. The password authentication using entertainment factors can enhance a user's ability to memorize a stronger password. In the paper entitled “Visual CAPTCHA Application in Linguistic Cryptography” by U. Ogiela, M. Takizawa, and L. Ogiela3 was presented a new idea of linguistic cryptography and linguistic techniques application for data analysis. Linguistic approach may be applied in cryptography, as well as in secret sharing systems implemented in Cloud or distributed computer infrastructure. Described methods allow to distribute data within a different authorized group of secret trustees, based on captcha analysis. The paper “CNN-based Malicious User Detection in Social Networks” by T. Hong, Ch. Choi, and J. Shin4 presents a new techniques proposed for detection of malicious users in social network services. In particular, authors proposed a method of following suggestions from users with less likelihood of committing malicious activities through an information-driven follow suggestion based on a categorical classification of interests using both the images and text of user posts. The images and text are learnt using a convolutional neural network, and the interests are classified into several categories. Users with a large number of posts are defined as certified users, and a database of certified users is established. Users with similar interests were recognized, and the similarity distances between certified users and users are measured, and a follow suggestion is generated to the certified user with the most similar interest. The overall precision during classification of the interest categories was at 79.93%, what indicate a high classification performance. The paper entitled “Design of a Secure and Effective Medical Cyber-Physical System for Ubiquitous Telemonitoring Pregnancy” by G.-Ch. Li, Ch.-L. Chen, H.-Ch. Chen, F. Lin, and Ch. Gu5 presents new solutions, which allow to support selected health care services and personal information management. Proposed solution is based on medical cyber-physical systems (MCPS) and presents a new level of integrated intelligence, characterized by interaction and coordination of computing processes with physical processes. In this paper, authors take advantage of the cloud computing and the high efficiency of MCPS to provide medical monitoring and also to protect pregnancy-related privacy. Identity-based encryption and signature cryptosystem were proposed as the best ways to ensure the security and privacy of health care data in the cloud. In the paper entitled “An MFCC-based Text-Independent Speaker Identification System for Access Control” by J.-Ch. Liu, F.-Y. Leu, G.-L. Lin, and H. Susanto6 was presented a new speaker identification system named mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), which allow to perform speaker identification for access control. Speaker identification is performed in in frequency domain, and the system uses human auditory filtering model to adjust the energy levels of different frequencies of voice quantified features. Also, a Gaussian mixture model is employed to represent the distribution of the logarithmic features for specific acoustic model, and for accessing a real-world object protected by the speaker identification system, acoustic model is compared with already known acoustic template. Based on the identification result, the identification system will determine whether the access will be accepted or denied. The paper “A Smart Service Model in Greenhouse Environment Using Event-Based Security Based on Wireless Sensor Network” by S. Sivamani, J. Choi, K. Bae, H. Ko, and Y. Cho7 discusses the security solution for the wireless sensor networks in the automated agricultural environment without any human intervention. In proposed solution, the sink node collects the sensor values, organizes the data, and transfers the data to the server, using encryption and private key communication. Secure protocol used in communication and encryption prevents the system from eavesdropping and forging. Some of the malicious events discussed in the papers may be prevented, so finally, data security and confidentiality are increased, what allow the better crop growth in greenhouse environment. We believe that papers included in this Special Issue will have a great impact for future scientific work and also make a contribution to the studies conducted by other researchers and practitioners, who work in the area of intelligent or cognitive systems and advanced computer security. We would like to express our sincere appreciation of the valuable contributions made by all authors. Our special thanks go to Professor Geoffrey C. Fox from Indiana University, Editor in Chief of the Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience Journal, for allowing us to publish this Special Issue and for his great support throughout the entire publication process.