Key management and key distribution for secure group communication in mobile and cloud network

With the computing systems becoming more and more pervasive and ubiquitous due to the invention of cloud computing and mobile phone based applications, secure data transmission is the pressing need for a real time perspective of the technologies. Examples of the need for secure key management and distribution environments include secure transmission of health related SMS, telecare medicine provisioning for critical applications such as heart disorders, secure agriculture monitoring, data transmission in surveillance scenarios, secure military networks, etc. In the context of key exchange for secure group communication, the computational complexities need to be addressed in particular due to the advent of resource constrained mobile phones, sensors and other embedded devices. This special issue introduces some of the novel approaches for enabling secure group communication in the contexts related to cloud and mobile computing.