Guest Editorial: Information Security South Africa (ISSA) 2013

Abstract

This special issue of the SAIEE Africa Research Journal is devoted to selected papers from the Information Security South Africa (ISSA) 2013 Conference which was held in Johannesburg, South Africa from 14 to 16 August 2013. The aim of the annual ISSA conference is to provide information security practitioners and researchers, from all over the globe, an opportunity to share their knowledge and research results with their peers. The 2013 conference focused on a wide spectrum of aspects in the information security domain. The fact that issues covering the functional, business, managerial, human, theoretical and technological aspects were addressed emphasizes the wide multi-disciplinary nature of modern-day information security. With the assistance of the original reviewers, twelve conference papers that received good overall reviews were identified. At the conference, I attended the presentation of each of these twelve papers and based on the reviewer reports and the presentations I selected six of these papers for possible publication in this Special Edition. The authors of these six selected papers were asked to rework their papers by expanding and/or further formalizing the research conducted. Each of these papers was subsequently reviewed again by a minimum of four international subject specialists. In some cases, where conflicting reviews were received, further reviews were requested. In some cases five reviews were requested to enable objective and quality decisions to be made. In all cases the reviews were conducted by members of the Technical Committee (TC) 11 of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) or some subject experts suggested by them. Thus, in all cases the reviews were conducted by reputable subject experts and enough reviews were received to make a confident decision as well as to improve the relevant papers. In the end three papers were selected to get published in this Special Edition after the reviewer comments were attended to satisfactorily. The three papers cover various aspects of information security. The one paper identifies some new ideas in the user authentication arena; one paper focuses on the very important area of IT forensics and the third paper on the ever-present cloud and associated issues. This Special Edition includes three very diverse papers in the discipline of information security, giving a true reflection of the multi-disciplinary nature field of study. Lastly, I would like to express my appreciation to IEEE Xplore, who originally published the ISSA conference papers, for granting permission that these reworked papers can be published in this Special Edition.