GUEST EDITORIAL

Information Security South Africa (ISSA) 2018

This special issue of the SAIEE Africa Research Journal is devoted to selected papers from the Information Security South Africa (ISSA) 2018 Conference which was held in Pretoria, South Africa from 15-16 August 2018. The aim of the annual ISSA conference is to afford information security practitioners and researchers, from all over the globe, an opportunity to share their knowledge and research results with their peers. The 2018 conference focused on a wide spectrum of aspects in the information security domain including the functional, business, managerial, human, theoretical and technological aspects of modern-day information security.

With the assistance of the original reviewers, conference papers that had received good overall reviews were identified. An expert panel (including myself) attended the presentation of each of these papers and based on the reviewer reports, and the presentations, five papers were selected by the panel for possible publication in this special issue. The authors of these five selected papers were invited to rework their papers by expanding and/or further formalising the research conducted. All five papers were submitted and subsequently reviewed again by a minimum of two reputable international subject specialists in a double-blind review process. These reviews were received to make a confident decision as to the inclusion of these papers in the special issue.

After the review process was completed, including attending to the reviewers' suggestions, only four papers were selected to be published in this special issue. These four papers cover various aspects of information security which include: investigating how information availability and security influence the likelihood of a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigation in a country; an evaluation framework for detecting manipulated smartphone data; applying distributed ledger (blockchain) technology to improve the verification of digital evidence integrity; and face antispoofing using shearlets. Therefore, this special issue includes four rather diverse papers in the discipline of information security, providing a true reflection of the multidisciplinary nature of this field of study.

I would like to thank the expert reviewers who diligently reviewed these papers. These reviews certainly contributed to the quality of this special issue.

To conclude, I would like to express my appreciation to Springer (Communications in Computer and Information Science) who originally published the ISSA conference papers, and for granting permission for these reworked papers to be published in this special issue.

Dr Jacques Ophoff

Guest Editor

University of Cape Town