Data security and applications have been expanded rapidly with many important challenges arising over the topic of communication networks. Recently, multimedia information (text, image, and video) usage has been increasing due to reduced cost techniques for transmitting this information over the world via different unsecured networks. However, prevention of copyright violation and ownership identification have been challenging issues due to attempts of malicious attacks/hacking of information over communication networks. The motive of these attacks can be to modify or delete the document watermark to illegally claim ownership or to prevent the information transfer to the intended recipients. Therefore, addressing these challenges has been an interesting problem for secure communication over open networks.

This special issue focuses on secure multimedia data transmission over communication networks, specifically data hiding in multimedia and its application to all research fields over communication networks.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Data hiding and reversible data hiding techniques
• Multimedia security related to watermarking and steganography
• Security evaluation for information hiding
• Multimedia data encryption and authentication over open networks
• Data hiding detection techniques for secure networks
• Security and privacy issues in data hiding system for secure communication
• Forensics based data hiding system over communication networks
• Secret image sharing system for secure communication
• Protecting systems against theft over communication networks