Security in big data

The phrase ‘Big Data’ refers to large, diverse, complex, longitudinal, and/or distributed data sets generated from instruments, sensors, Internet transactions, email, video, click streams, and/or all other digital sources available today and in the future, as defined by U.S. National Science Foundation in its recent solicitation. The research of Big Data will accelerate the progress of scientific discovery and innovation; lead to new fields of inquiry that would not otherwise be possible, encourage the development of new data analytic tools and algorithms; facilitate scalable, accessible, and sustainable data infrastructure; increase understanding of human and social processes and interactions; and promote economic growth and improved health and quality of life. The new knowledge, tools, practices, and infrastructures produced will enable breakthrough discoveries and innovation in science, engineering, medicine, commerce, education, and national security. Big Data presents critical requirements for security in data collection and transmission of selected data through a communication network. This special issue contains 11 papers selected from submissions to the open call for papers on Security in Big Data. These papers highlight some of the current research interests and achievements in the area of security in Big Data. The wide use of high-performance image acquisition devices and powerful image-processing software has made it easy to tamper images for malicious purposes. The paper by Zhang et al. proposes an effective framework for revealing image-splicing forgery. The experiment results show that the proposed method can perform better than some state-of-the-art methods in terms of the detection performance over the Columbia image-splicing detection evaluation data set. Network coding has emerged some exciting future because of its smart technology in wireless sensor networks. At the same time, it is facing security attacks, especially conspiracy attack. The paper by Du et al. proposes a weakly secure scheme from the perspective of topology. Considering the performance of this scheme, an advanced scheme is put forward later. Simulations show that the two strategies can prevent cooperative eavesdroppers from acquiring any useful information transmitted from source node to sink node, and the performance of advanced scheme is better. Traditionally, jamming to the wireless system is a fatal threat to the security of home area networks (HANs), which impedes the two-way data transmission between electric devices and the smart meter and thus deteriorates the reliability of the in-home communication of Smart Grid. The paper by Li et al. incorporates the power line system into the HAN and proposes a hybrid architecture of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing-based wireless communication and power line communication for the Smart Grid security application. With this new solution, the channel diversity of the HAN is realized, and the communication reliability is still guaranteed even when the wireless channel suffers from jamming. Information of multi-cells is big data because of the enormous quantities of various cells as well as their parameters and status. To securely and efficiently integrate all the cells’ information and trace multi-cells are challenging because of varying number of the multi-cells, as well as the complicacy of the multi-cells’ movement. The paper by Yin and Sun proposes an automatic big data integration algorithm based on the optical transfer function. The experimental results show that the algorithm can securely and efficiently integrate all the cell information and simultaneously track a large quantity of cells. Real-time digital video presents great challenges on processing and storage and is a typical example in Big Data. How to secure and efficiently transmit digital video is critical. The paper by Zhang et al. uses the distributed compressed sensing to deal with video coding. To reduce the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm computational complexity, quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to reconstruct video signal. Simulation results demonstrate that it can obtain the better reconstructed video with low sample value and it can guarantee safety performance. Wireless image sensor network generates a large number of images from the distributed camera sensors. The image data need to be delivered securely and efficiently to the sink in many circumstances. The current nodedisjoint multipath and dispersive routings cannot provide enough security and efficiency for the image data collection and transportation. The paper by Su and Hu proposes an ellipse batch dispersive routing algorithm to address the secure and efficient data collection issue in wireless image sensor network.