A special issue of International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems
Recent years have witnessed the rapid development and wide-spread application of wireless communication technologies, which have significantly enhanced access to Internet services and provide various means for ubiquitous computing that enables high-speed and high-quality information exchange between mobile/portable devices located anywhere in the globe. Among the various application scenarios enabled by these technologies, DTN (Delay-Tolerant Networks) and VANETs (Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks) represent the most promising and popular ones, as they are characterized by autonomous and adaptive communications.
DTN concerns partial sub-networks, aiming at providing network connections between devices and areas that are not well-served by current networking technology. The nodes in DTN carry the packets while they are moving, and then forward the packets once a wireless connection is available between them. Vehicular communications allow the real-time information exchange between vehicles and infrastructures, with the objective of enhancing road safety and optimizing road traffic. VANETs are primarily enabled by inter-vehicular (or Car-to-Car, C2C) communications and vehicle-roadside communications (or Car-to-Infrastructure, C2I).
Despite their tremendous potential and far-reaching impacts on the revolution of human life, both DTNs and VANETs suffer from security and privacy issues which dramatically limit their applications. First of all, they have similar vulnerabilities to other wireless networks, which allow attackers to manipulate and inject messages, breaching system availability, confidentiality and integrity. Besides the traditional prevention techniques, trust management may serve as another security basis for nodes cooperation and information dissemination. Furthermore, the unique characteristics of DTNs and VANETs such as uncertain mobility and unpredictable latency, make security for those networks even more challenging. In particular, due to the frequent disconnections between nodes in DTNs, distributed certificate authorities rather than centralized ones are more desirable (while the frequent distribution of a large amount of certificates should be avoided due to high round-trip time), and the user credentials/keys should be updated periodically instead of relying on revocation messages. Moreover, due to the sporadic connectivity and long delay of message transmissions in DTNs, secure message management is needed to eliminate expired messages and avoid information leakage.
In VANETs, the high-speed mobility and the large number of network entities call for time-efficient and cost-saving authorization and authentication models, as well as fast attacker detection, revocation and trace back schemes. In addition, both DTN and VANETs suffer from the privacy-invasive issue, which naturally arises in the environment where the mobile equipments are bounded to the moving users. A suite of privacy-preserving techniques are required to provide the fine level protection of the critical information and user profiles, e.g., a set of equipments related to a particular user in DTNs, personal information (and the liability in case of authority investigation) related to drivers and passengers in VANETs.
This special issue is devoted to the most state-of-the-art proposals and cutting-edge research achievements on security and privacy issues in both DTN and VANETs.
We solicit papers that report original and unpublished work on topics including, but not limited to, the following:
- Anonymity, authentication and key management
- Attacker trace back
- Denial of service and Sybil attacks
- Identity theft and phishing in VANETs
- Location privacy and user privacy
- Intrusion detection, misbehaviour detection and response
- Privacy preserving
- Revocation of compromised nodes
- Security models/architectures and threat models
- Secure communications protocols
- Secure positioning
- Secure billing in VANETs
- Surveillance and monitoring
- Tamper proof device
- Trust management
- Vulnerability/attacker modeling and analysis
Manuscripts due: 1 June, 2008
Notification to authors: 1 October, 2008
Revised papers due: 1 November, 2008
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