Editorial: Special issue on security and privacy in network computing

Computer networks have revolutionized traditional computing architectures and created a wide range of network computing paradigms, including blockchain [1], distributed computing [11], cloud computing [9], Web services [2], Internet of Things [4, 10], crowdsourcing [9], etc. Such a class of paradigms is able to integrate heterogeneous resources provided from different parties, largely extends the computation capacity and empowers a variety of novel use cases and applications. However, the diversity of network technologies and the complex protocols used among computing parties might contain security loopholes, which could be abused by benign users or malicious attackers unintentionally or on purpose, thus compromising the integrity, confidentiality and availability of the computation [7]. Security incidents happened in practical systems repeatedly revealed such threats, creating financial loss and social upsets. On the other hand, the diversity and the unique characteristics of network computing paradigms make a silver bullet for the general solution difficult to seek. Therefore, securing network computing is urgent and challenging, calling for non-trivial collective efforts from multiple parties, including https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-019-00704-x