Cellular automata (CA) as a fully parallel modern computational model have been widely used and successfully applied to different and interdisciplinary scientific fields. It is basically local in their nature, CA have been proven perfect schemes in many cases since they can capture the essential features of these systems where global behaviour arises from the combined effect of simple components which interrelate locally.

While most of these situation and systems are also continuous in their nature, examining their inherent characteristics in a discrete manner does shrink the quality of the provided CA application modeling and simulation solutions. In addition, parallelism and locality features of CA allow a simple parallelization, an extremely significant and desirable property given the current scenario of hardware architectures. In spite of the already achieved results, advances in theory and computational properties of the CA methods and applications of CA to interdisciplinary scientific fields are continuously proposed by various research groups all over the world to overcome CA applications in cryptography field difficulties and to produce enhanced performance for the resulted methods.

This special issue aims at dealing with the aforementioned issues and challenges that providing a forum for the discussion and presentation of CA as theoretical models in cryptography and existing solutions to various problems in different field.

Aims and Scope:

1. Complex systems and networks
2. Neural networks
3. Cloud computing
4. Image processing
5. Cryptography
6. Random number generation
7. Natural computing
8. Parallelism
9. Dynamical systems