The purpose of this special issue is to collate a selection of representative research articles that were primarily presented at the 12th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom 2013). This annual conference brings together researchers and practitioners in the world from both academia and industry who are working on trusted computing and communications in computer systems and networks, in order to promote an exchange of ideas, discuss future collaborations, and develop new research directions.Big data is now invading in every aspect of our daily life and promise to revolutionize our life. For example, human beings create about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day in 2012, which come from sensors, individual archives, social networks, Internet of Things, enterprise, and Internet in all scales and formats. We face the most challenging issue, that is, how to effectively manage such a large amount of data and identify new ways to analyze large amounts of data and unlock information. This special issue presents many examples of how researchers, scholars, vendors, and practitioners are collaborating to address security and reliability research challenges.The scope of this special issue is broad and is representative of the multi-disciplinary nature of security and reliability. In addition to submissions that deal with security challenges, reliability issues, theoretical analysis, algorithms, and practical experience in the context of big data, this issue also includes articles that address practical challenges with handling large-scale data and applications.The effective protection of information and privacy in the context of big data is a central topic of this issue. Gwan-Hwan Hwang et al.[1] present a scheme to fulfill mutual nonrepudiation for cloud storage that is now a popular way in people's daily life. [2,4] describes a new way to protect outsourced data in cloud computing through access management. Yulei Wu et al. [3] provide the insights into the issue in IPv6 adoption and show a special view from the Chinese IPv6 Application mix. To apply the encryption technique to protect the real-world data, key management is an essential issue. Guojun Wang et al. [4] propose to use the multilinear forms to achieve decentralized Group Key Management for Hierarchical Access Control. Chang Liu et al.[5] develop a hierarchical key exchange scheme for secure scheduling and auditing of big data.How to effectively analyze and utilize large-scale data is an interesting topic of this issue. Jinson Zhang et al.[6] present a new density approach that can produce a new model for analyzing and visualizing big data analysis. Guiyi Wei et al. [7] target on the service cooperation in VANETs and introduce a game-based incentive model to improve the service cooperation.We encourage the readers to review [8][9][10] to gain insight into the breadth and depth of problems and innovative solutions about high performance and reliable computing in the context of big data, such a...