Security for cyberspace: challenges and opportunities

Nowadays, cyberspace has become the “fifth frontier” after the ocean, land, air, and space. With the globalization of information, cyberspace has never faced so many challenges, such as principle innovation, theory innovation, technology innovation, and application innovation. Thus, the transition from traditional cyberspace to new cyberspace is inevitable. In the future, cyberspace will have many important characteristics, such as openness, heterogeneity, mobility, dynamism, and security. With the rapid development of information technologies, future cyberspace will have higher openness, dynamism, and flexibility. The realization of cyberspace security is particularly important and emergent. Compared with traditional network security, future cyberspace security has its particularity because of the following factors. First, the traditional static security methods based on known threat characteristics can no longer effectively defend against novel threats, such as 0-day attacks and advanced persistent threats (APT). Specifically, for backdoor threats, neither static defense nor dynamic defense, not even encryption technology, can do anything about it. By exploiting the concealed and complicated means, attackers could launch targeted attacks and persistent penetrations, presenting strong concealment, latent and long-term entanglement. Usually, the detection and isolation nature of passive defense technology are invalid for these unknown novel threats. Second, because future network is based on network programming and virtualization, it can provide programmable interfaces for network applications, and these interfaces will also provide opportunity for hackers to attack, making future networks face greater risks than traditional networks. Third, due to the incomplete collection of network traffic, state and semantic gap, vulnerability analysis is difficult. To achieve multi-level, multi-angle, and multifunction security threat assessment, security defense and awareness approaches are necessary. Regarding the aforementioned challenges, novel and efficient security should be studied. First, security should be taken as the priority in the design of architecture, to avoid or reduce the threat of attacks from various unknown vulnerabilities or backdoors in hardware and software designs, to make the system immune to endogenous security. Second, dynamic defense architecture should be considered, which can provide adaptive security protection for cyberspace. Moreover, many advanced security technologies, such as novel cryptography, should be studied and used. Finally, novel networking, computing, and artificial intelligence can all benefit high-level security for future cyberspace. In this context, the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) organized a special issue of “Cyberspace Security” in Frontiers of Information Technology and Electronic Engineering. This special issue aims to promote advanced theory, technologies, and industry of cyberspace security. Seven papers are included in this special issue, by invitation or Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering www.jzus. zju.edu. cn; engineering.cae. cn; www.springerlink. com ISSN 2095-9184 (print); ISSN 2095-9230 (online) E-mail: jzus@zju.edu. cn