Guest Editorial
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| Title | Guest Editorial |
| Authors | |
| Abstract | The rapid advancement of communications and networking technologies has revolutionized humans lifestyles by providing the best convenience and flexibility ever in accessing the Internet services and various types of personal communication applications. For instance, with the emerging wireless communication technologies, healthcare industry now is offering high-quality services to patients at low costs through a variety of applications. It can provide the right care to patients with different needs and patients can be treated in alternative, more cost-effective settings, for example, patients homes or workplaces, instead of in traditional costly hospital settings. This is because these wireless-equipped healthcare systems enable remote and continuous monitoring of patients’ health status in both residential settings and outdoor settings, where patients feel more comfortable and their activities are less restricted. As always, while we experience tremendous benefits from adopting the new technologies, i.e., latest communication and networking technologies, and at the same time, we also face many challenges especially with respect to security and privacy issues. This is made worse by the fact that modern technology may have provided increased comfort and convenience in our daily lives but at the expense of privacy. This special issue consists of six papers addressing the security and privacy issues in communication systems and networks such as vehicular communication systems, delay tolerant networking and wireless mesh networks. Recently, vehicular communication networking has emerged as a promising approach for facilitating road safety, traffic management, and infotainment dissemination for drivers and passengers. However, the attractive features of VANET inevitably incur higher risks for abuse if privacy and security have not yet been addressed before the widely deployment of such networks. It would jeopardize the public safety and become the main barrier to the acceptance of such a new technology. The first paper aims to address the important security and privacy issues in VANETs. In the first paper, “Prioritized WAVE-based Parking Assistance with Security and User Anonymity”, an elliptic curve based secure application for parking assistance to WAVE-enabled vehicles is presented by S. Biswas and J. Misic. In this work, vehicles and infrastructure use separate access categories to exchange parking assistance application messages. The authentication mechanism uses a vehicles current location information as the "identity" to generate the signature so that the user remains anonymous. The second paper entitled "Designing P2P Networks Tolerant to Attacks and Faults based on Bimodal Degree Distribution" by K. Suto, H. Nishiyama, S. Shen, and N. Kato, addresses the stability and communication efficiency of P2P networks, and proposes a novel method to construct P2P networks based on the bimodal degree distribution, to achieve high stability and communication efficiency. The third paper entitled "Mitigating Eavesdropping Attack Using Secure Key Management Scheme in Wireless Mesh Networks" by F. Kandah, Y. Singh and W. Zhang, presents an effective secure key management scheme (SKeMS) seeking an encryption key assignment, such that the induced network is securely key connected and well protected against potential malicious eavesdropping attacks. SKeMS, by assigning the available encryption keys among all nodes in the network considering the 2-hop eavesdropping ability, provides a more secured network against malicious eavesdropping attack compared to that using previous key assignment schemes. In the fourth paper, "Privacy Support in People-centric Sensing", an approach to support privacy in people-centric sensing is proposed by L. Becchetti, L. Filipponi and A. Vitaletti. The technique allows user-assisted coverage of a given area of interest without disclosing user geographical information. The results of extensive experimental analysis on public data from real applications are presented, supporting the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed technique. The fifth paper entitled "A Secure Message Transaction Protocol for Delay Tolerant Networks" by Z. Jia, L. Li, Z. Yu, S. Li and Y. Yang, deals with the security and path recording of DTN message delivery and presents a payment mechanism, which makes the participants have no incentive to launch the collusion attacks in the path disclosure. In the last paper, “Trust-based Mutual Authentication for Bootstrapping in 6LoWPAN”, H. Yu and J. He aim at secure bootstrapping in 6LoWPAN by establishing pairwise keys between neighboring nodes as well as trust paths from nodes to the base station. Pairwise keys that are established using mutual authentication based on pairing requires the storage of only one key along with the exchange of IDs. A trust path is established based on trust evaluation that uses multiple criteria to balance the whole network. Quantitative analysis shows that although the proposed scheme is a little higher in energy consumption than protocols that are based on Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), the storage requirement for each node is much lower than those protocols and that the trust evaluation mechanism can balance the whole network to prolong the life of the network. In closing, we would like to thank all the authors who have submitted their research work to this special issue. We would also like to acknowledge the contribution of many experts in the field who have participated in the review process and provided helpful suggestions to the authors on improving the content and presentation of the papers. We would also like to express our gratitude to the Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Haohong Wang, and Associate Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Song Ci, for their support and help in bringing forward this special issue. We hope you will enjoy the papers in the special issue. |
| Publisher | ACADEMY PUBLISHER |
| Date | 2012-08-01 |
| Source | Journal of Communications Vol 7, No 8 (2012): Special Issue: Security and Privacy in Communication Systems and Networks |
| Rights | Copyright © ACADEMY PUBLISHER - All Rights Reserved.To request permission, please check out URL: http://www.academypublisher.com/copyrightpermission.html. |