Multimedia Information Networking and Security include a number of related topics such as information networking, communication, security and sharing services, etc., Significant attention has been paid in the past years to design flexible and powerful solutions to this field, as the rapid development of communication technology, utilizing network to realize global communications has become the trend of information exchange. Although the Internet has reached great success in contributing to communications between people, it has been under almost constant attack by hackers. Many attacks seek to exploit vulnerabilities of software systems like application programs or other computer programs. In other words, shared network resources also bring a variety of risks.

This special issue aims to expose the readership to the latest research results on multimedia information networking and security. It is composed of 12 papers, including a number of related topics, demonstrate pioneer work, investigate novel solutions and discuss the future trends in this field.

The first paper, “Extensive Design for Attack’s Recognition and Resistance of Survivable Network” by Hui Xu and Xiang Gu, gives a solution of attack defense of survivable network based on extentics. The basic knowledge of extension theory is introduced and the inspiration from it to problem in this paper is illustrated. The contradictory characteristic of survivability of borderless network is explained. The extension model and algorithms of recognition and resistance of attacks is presented. The definitions of element, including message matter-element, defense affair-element, node relation-element and inform mixture-element, are given. The dependent function based on lateral distance with the most advantage point occurs in the left common endpoint, is constructed to solve the problem and its properties are discussed. Finally, an application of worm’s warning by this method is illustrated.

In the second paper, “A Graph Clustering Algorithm Providing Scalability” by Lei Huang, Jiabing Wang and Xing He, proposes a new scalable graph clustering method called APANC (Affinity Propagation And Normalized Cut) based on the current studies on the algorithms of the affinity propagation and normalized cut. During the APANC process, the authors firstly use the “Affinity Propagation” (AP) to preliminarily group the original data in order to reduce the data-scale, and then they further group the result of AP using “Normalized Cut” (NC) to get the final result. Through such combination, the advantages of AP in time costs and the advantages of NC in accuracy have been adopted. The experimental results show that even though APANC includes two clustering processes, this two-phase algorithm helps to reduce the experiment time compared to NC, and meanwhile, maintain the accuracy. Furthermore, the advantages of APANC in time costs could be greater when data scale increases.

The third paper, “A Novel Turbo-Based Encryption Scheme Using Dynamic Puncture Mechanism” by Qian Mao and Chuan Qin, proposes a novel encryption method based on Turbo code. In most communication systems, information encryption and error correction are always independent. While joint encryption and error correction codes combine these two processes into one. In order to provide information encryption and error correction simultaneously, the authors generate a normal random sequence that controls the puncturing mechanism by a secret key in the Turbo encoder. The puncturing mechanism is dynamic and controlled by the secret key. On the other hand, the keycontrolled puncturing mechanism deletes the parity bits randomly, which ensures a high error correction capability for the Turbo code. When decoding, only the legal receiver can generate the same normal random sequence using the secret key, then classify and decrypt the received sequence correctly. While for the illegal receivers, because a wrong secret key results in a wrong puncturing mechanism, and the Turbo decoder is sensitive to the puncturing mechanism, they will get a totally wrong decoding result. Meanwhile, this coding scheme also provides good error correction capability for the encrypted information while it is transmitted in a noisy channel. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs well in terms of both security and error-immunity.

In the fourth paper, “A Statistical Amalgamation Approach for Ontologies” by Peng Liu et al., put forward another way of ontology merging. After statistic machine learning on concept relations, the frequency of different ontologies appeared in concept relations reveals certainty factor and help to build a large-scale concept relations network including the statistic information and domain categories, so that the conceptions conveyed by different ontologies can be fused together and the merging concept space turns to be relatively objective. And the experiments results also help to demonstrate the feasibility of the ontology merging.

The fifth paper, “Adaptive Ant Colony Clustering Method Applied to Finding Closely Communicating Community” by Yan Liu, Lian Liu and Junyong Luo, investigate community structures in networks. This paper points out that losely communicating community is different from the traditional community which emphasize particularly on structure or context. The authors’ previous method played more emphasis on the feasibility that ant colony algorithm applied to community detection. However the essence of closely communicating community did not be described clearly. In this paper, the definition of closely communicating community is put forward firstly, the four features are described and corresponding methods are introduced to achieve the value of features between each pair. Meanwhile, pair propinquity and local propinquity are put forward and used to guide ants’ decision. Based on the previous work, the closely communicating community detection method is improved in four aspects of adaptive adjusting, which are entropy based weight modulation, combining historical paths and random wandering to select next coordination, the strategy of forcing unloading and the adaptive change of ant’s eyesight. The value selection of parameters is discussed in the portion of experiments, and the results also reveal the improvement of our algorithm in adaptive adjusting.

In the sixth paper, “Applying Stylometric Analysis Techniques to Counter Anonymity in Cyberspace” by Jianwen Sun et al., proposes a framework for online writeprint identification. Variable length character n-gram is used to represent the author’s writing style. The technique of IG seeded GA based feature selection for Ensemble (IGAE) is also developed to build an identification model based on individual author level features. Several specific components for dealing with the individual feature set are integrated to improve the performance. The proposed feature and technique are evaluated on a real world data set encompassing reviews posted by 50 Amazon customers. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed framework, with accuracy over 94% for 20 authors and over 80% for 50 ones. Compared with the baseline technique (Support Vector Machine), a higher performance is achieved by using IGAE, resulting in a 2% and 8% improvement over SVM for 20 and 50 authors respectively. Moreover, it has been shown that IGAE is more scalable in terms of the number of authors, than author group level based methods.

The seventh paper, “A Secure Mutual Authentication Protocol for Roaming in Wireless Mesh Networks” by Peng Xiao, Jingsha He and Yingfang Fu, proposes a new protocol based on multi-signature and three-party key agreement with a zone-based hierarchical network topology and prove the security properties of the protocol through formal analysis that is based on the strand space model after analyzing some current authentication protocols for roaming in wireless mesh networks. It also demonstrates the reliability and performance of the proposed protocol through network simulations.

In the eighth paper, “Fake BTS Attacks of GSM System on Software Radio Platform” by Yubo Song, Kan Zhou, and Xi Chen, presents an implement of fake BTS based on software radio technologies. This paper also discusses two types of fake BTS attacks on our software radio platform. The first attack is IMSI/IMEI catch attack, which can get the mobile phone’s IMSI and IMEI. With this information, attacker can got the track of the man with this phone. The second attack is selective jamming attack. After get the IMSI and IMEI of the mobile phone, the attackers can decide whether the mobile phone is blocked or not. The authors will analyze the GSM protocol which is relevant to the interception system and later present the performance of such a system by real tests and demonstrate its feasibility.

The ninth paper, “Lower Bounds of Differential and Linear Active S-boxes for Generalized Feistel Network with SP Type F-function” by Ting Cui and Chenhui Jin, studies the minimum number of differential/linear active S-boxes for a class of generalized Feistel cipher with SP type F-function (GFNSP for short). The authors prove that m rounds m-GFNSP guarantee one differential active S-box and one linear active S-box, and 2m(m≥3) rounds guarantee differential active S-boxes and linear active S-boxes, where and are the differential and the linear branch number of the diffusion layer in F-function respectively. Hence, lower bound of the number of differential active S-boxes and that of linear active S-boxes for GFNSP with arbitrary round are deduced respectively, moreover, the previous one could be reachable for and as well as the latter one be reachable for and , where denotes the number of rounds.

In the tenth paper, “Distributed Hash Tables for Peer-to-Peer Mobile Ad-hoc Networks with Security Extensions” by Grant P. Millar, Emmanouil A. Panaousis and Christos Politis, describes peer-to-peer distributed hash table (DHT) architecture entitled Reliable Overlay Based Utilisation of Services and Topology (ROBUST) firstly. This is designed to be efficiently applied to MANETs. Additionally, it proposes security extensions to protect the ROBUST signalling messages against malicious activities. This paper evaluates the ROBUST performance as well as the security extensions under varying levels of mobility and network sizes by building a custom DHT module for the network simulator ns-2. The outcome of the results show negligible overhead introduced by the extensions giving credence to their application in security sensitive scenarios.

In the eleventh paper, “The Probability of Trojan Attacks on Multi-level Security Strategy based Network” by Lansheng Han et al., discusses that the Trojan horses’ attacks have a dependency on data path in the network and establishes three attacking probability models of single source node to single target node by single-path, single source node to single target node by multi-path and multi-source nodes to single target node by multi-path considering the relationship between defend ability and security levels, the paper. Furthermore, the paper describes the defend ability of the non-adjacent nodes with a new model. Finally the model is applied to a military network information system, and the results are reasonable.

In the twelfth paper, “A Review on Cloud Computing Development” by Sugang Ma, cloud computing can provide critical services for business management, reducing IT costs and maintenance costs of hardware and software effectively. In the meanwhile, it can enable enterprises to access to professional IT solutions with less IT investment. Cloud computing is of great significance for the ICT industry of each country. It is now bringing enormous impact to the human society, especially the business world. In this paper, the basic concepts and the development of cloud computing were introduced, and then the current situation and development of cloud computing research from two aspects of technology and business were illustrated. Finally future trends of cloud computing were discussed.

The guest editors wish to thank Dr. Niki Pissinou for providing the opportunity to edit this special issue on Recent Advances in Information Networking, Services and Security, and Dr. Shiguo Lian for providing latest publishing information. We would also like to thank the authors for submitting their works as well as the referees who have critically evaluated the papers within the short stipulated time. Finally, we hope the reader will share our joy and find this special issue very useful.