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Journal of Computer and System Sciences ••• (••••) •••–•••

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Computer and System Sciences

www.elsevier.com/locate/jcss

Foreword

Editors’ foreword: Special Issue on Theory and Applications inParallel and Distributed Computing

Computing systems are now pervasive in every aspect of our daily life and promise to revolutionize our life. The emer-gence of the related technology is a natural outcome of research and technological advances in a variety of areas of paralleland distributed computing. These new and exciting parallel and distributed computing paradigms have become the sup-porting element to every angle of modern human society. This special issue presents the recent advances in parallel anddistributed computing, in particular, with focuses on theory and applications. This special issue covers two broad areas:1) theory in parallel and distributed computing, and 2) applications in parallel and distributed computing.

In response to the call for papers, we received 39 submissions from worldwide. The submitted papers are not substan-tially overlap with papers that have been published or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference withproceedings. Each paper has gone through a rigorous blind peer-review process by at least two international researchers.Finally we accepted 8 papers from the submissions, representing the acceptance rate of 20.5%.

We are pleased to present to you the following 8 papers dealing with cutting-edge research and technologies. In thefirst paper, “Building Access Control Policy Model for Privacy Preserving and Testing Policy Conflicting Problems” [1], Wanget al. propose a purpose-based access control model in distributed computing environment for privacy preserving policiesand mechanisms, and describe algorithms for policy conflicting problems. Privacy preserving is increasing in its importancesince privacy has become a major concern for both customers and enterprises in today’s corporate marketing strategies.

Workload management in a virtualized cloud environment has become a complex task nowadays. In the second paper,“Proactive Workload Management in Dynamic Virtualized Environments” [2], Sallam et al. propose a new proactive workloadmanagement model for virtualized resources to inspect the workload behavior of the running virtual machines, and toassent an appropriate scheduling and resource consolidation schema in order to improve the system efficiency, utilization,and throughput.

Same as the second paper, the third paper, “A Comprehensive Approach to Securing Cloud Data Storage Systems – A NovelCryptographic Role Based Access Control Scheme and Its Secure Administration” [3], is related to cloud systems. As we know,cloud systems provide significant benefits by allowing users to store massive amount of data on demand in a cost-effectivemanner. However, security and privacy are the major concerns of adopting cloud systems. Zhou and Varadharajan proposea role-based encryption (RBE) that uses cryptographic techniques to enforce role-based access policies and a cryptographicadministrative model for managing and enforcing role-based access policies for cryptographic role-based access controlschemes.

In the fourth paper, “Dynamics Stability in Wireless Senor Networks Active Defense Model” [4], Chen et al. proposea proactive defense model to secure the distributed wireless sensor networks. As the nodes in wireless sensor networkshave limited ability to learn the evolution of rationality from different attack strategies of the attacker, this system candynamically adjust its defense strategies to achieve the most effective defense. The evaluation shows that the defense costsuch as energy consumption has been greatly saved and the life cycle of the nodes has been extended.

In the fifth paper, “EFADS: Efficient, Flexible and Anonymous Data Sharing Protocol for Cloud Computing with ProxyRe-Encryption” [5], Wei et al. propose an efficient and anonymous data sharing protocol with flexible sharing style, namedEFADS, for outsourcing data onto the cloud. By using a novel proxy re-encryption scheme, EFADS allows the data holder toshare the data efficiently when the data is not originally generated by the data holder, and the data sharer list is dynamic.EFADS can also preserve data sharer’s anonymity even if the adversary corrupts the cloud server.

Building a platform for processing big data is extremely challenging in terms of storage management, computationalcapability, scalability and reliability. In the sixth paper, “A Spatiotemporal Compression Based Approach for Efficient BigData Processing on Cloud” [6], Yang et al. propose a novel technique for effectively processing big data, especially streamingbig graph data on cloud. With this technique, the big data will be compressed with its spatiotemporal features on cloud.By exploring spatial correlation of big data, a graph data set is partitioned into clusters so that, in one cluster all edges

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcss.2014.04.0160022-0000/© 2014 Published by Elsevier Inc.

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2 Foreword

from the graph have similar time series of data. The evaluation shows that the spatiotemporal compression on cloud cansignificantly reduce the data size compared to the previous big data processing techniques without compression.

In the seventh paper, “One-Time Packet Key Exchange Scheme for Secure Real-Time Multimedia Applications” [7], Jungand Festijo propose a selective packet key encryption scheme that selectively encrypts RTP packets using different keys inthe same session for real-time multimedia applications.

The main feature of this proposed scheme is that it uses a one-time packet key, which will never be reused throughoutthe same session. The use of the one-time packet key enables the significant security improvement in real-time multimediaapplications.

With the popularity of the GPS-equipped devices such as smart phones, a massive amount of location data is beingcollected, raising the issue of the privacy risks incurred by the individuals whose movements are recorded. In the lastpaper, “De-Anonymization Attack on Geolocated Data” [8], Gambs et al. discover a specific inference attack called the de-anonymization attack, by which an adversary tries to infer the identity of a particular individual behind a set of mobilitytraces. They propose an implementation of this attack based on a mobility model called Mobility Markov Chain (MMC).Discussion on defending against such attack is presented.

We sincerely hope that you will enjoy reading these papers and find them interesting. We thank all the internationalreviewers for their professional services. We deeply thank Professor E.K. Blum, the Managing Editor of JCSS, for providingthis opportunity to publish this special issue. With his continuous support, encouragement and guidance throughout thispublishing project, this special issue has been very successful.

References

[1] H. Wang, et al., Building access control policy model for privacy preserving and testing policy conflicting problems, J. Comput. Syst. Sci. (2014), in thisissue.

[2] A. Sallam, et al., Proactive workload management in dynamic virtualized environments, J. Comput. Syst. Sci. (2014), in this issue.[3] Zhou, Varadharajan, A comprehensive approach to securing cloud data storage systems – a novel cryptographic role based access control scheme and

its secure administration, J. Comput. Syst. Sci. (2014), in this issue.[4] Z. Chen, et al., Dynamics stability in wireless senor networks active defense model, J. Comput. Syst. Sci. (2014), in this issue.[5] Wei, et al., EFADS: efficient, flexible and anonymous data sharing protocol for cloud computing with proxy re-encryption, J. Comput. Syst. Sci. (2014), in

this issue.[6] Yang, et al., A spatiotemporal compression based approach for efficient big data processing on cloud, J. Comput. Syst. Sci. (2014), in this issue.[7] Jung, Festijo, One-time packet key exchange scheme for secure real-time multimedia applications, J. Comput. Syst. Sci. (2014), in this issue.[8] S. Gambs, et al., De-anonymization attack on geolocated data, J. Comput. Syst. Sci. (2014), in this issue.

Guest EditorsProf. Yang Xiang ∗

Deakin University, AustraliaE-mail address: yang@deakin.edu.au

Prof. Ivan StojmenovicUniversity of Ottawa, Canada

E-mail address: ivan@site.uottawa.ca

Dr. Peter MuellerIBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland

E-mail address: pmu@zurich.ibm.com

4 February 2014Available online xxxx

* Corresponding author.