The next generation of cyberspace online world of the future should be open, interoperable, reliable, and secure. Through next-generation cyberspace, individuals and communities are able to connect, socialize, and organize together. The goal of next-generation cyberspace is to deliver breakthrough innovation results for enterprises, enabling new products/services/markets, providing better quality for the digital economy and building better governments. However, there is existing challenges (such as growing demands, threats, constrained resources, and heterogeneous environments exist) in establishing next-generation cyberspace. It also calls for security and personal privacy considerations. The starting point for building a next-generation cyberspace can be found in a multitude of wired and wireless communication environments and a new technology or concept to support differentiated human-centric operations. The research efforts should provide innovative solutions in order to deliver resilient, cost-effective capabilities to the next-generation cyberspace and to meet the operational requirements in terms of security and privacy. The main motivation for this special issue is to bring together researchers from academic and industry laboratories to discuss current research issues and advances, which cover diverse aspects of next-generation cyberspace. The aim of our special issue is to provide a platform for discussing relevant research questions and engagement in the growing area of next-generation cyberspace. We have received many manuscripts. However, only 12 manuscripts in high quality were finally selected for this special issue. Each manuscript selected was blind reviewed by at least three reviewers consisting of guest editors and external reviewers. The first paper entitled “Server-based Code Obfuscation Scheme for APK Tamper Detection” by Yuxue Piao et al. analyzes the DexGuard tool from both a static and dynamic points of view. Their analysis reveals that DexGuard has some weaknesses. In this paper, they proposed an obfuscation technique based on a client/server model with one-time secret key delivery using SMS or network protocol. The main concept is to store the core execute class file through obfuscation on the server. When a program needs to execute core routines, it must request these routines from the server. In this way, they can protect Android apps from reverse engineering. The second paper entitled “An Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting Mechanism for 3G/WLAN Networks” by Wei-Chen Wu and Horng-Twu Liaw proposes a practical, efficient, and secure authentication, authorization, and accounting mechanism within the interworking architecture proposed by 3GPP. The next paper entitled “Identifying an OpenID Anti-Phishing Scheme for Cyberspace” by Haider Abbas et al. presents a user authentication scheme. This paper aims at identifying and discussing a solution to OpenID phishing by proposing a user authentication scheme that allows OpenID providers to identify a user using publicly known entities. The research will help in next-generation cyber security innovations by reducing the authentication dependency on user credentials. The authentication scheme is also validated through detailed descriptions of use cases and prototype implementation. “A Histogram-based Method for Efficient Detection of Rewriting Attacks in SOAP Messages” by Aziz Nasridinov et al. presents an efficient method for detecting XML rewriting attacks on SOAP messages using a histogram. With the proposed method, once the source of attacks is identified, it saves in the form of a histogram, which enables us to maintain a statistical information about the location of the attack in the SOAP message. This information can be used to detect attacks in the future and thus avoid unnecessary check of all elements in the SOAP message. Experiments show that the methods outperform those existing methods by several times in many cases. “Implementation of Vessel Traffic System's Mobile Middleware Platform for Secure IVEF Service” by Namje Park and Hyo-Chan Bang presents a vessel traffic service platform for securing inter-VTS data exchange format (IVEF). In this paper, they developed a system enabling IVEF service simulation under a wireless environment made possible by improving IVEF SDK, which is an open source. For this, a mobile phone loaded with Android platform and desktop PC has been used for emulation of a ship on voyage and VTS center. “Optimisation Based Collaborative Determination of Component Trustworthiness in Service Compositions” by Hisain Elshaafi and Dmitri Botvich describes a collaborative trustworthiness determination approach using optimization that can provide a solution to select trustworthy component service constructs based on monitoring and consumer quality of experience reporting of existing composite services from peer providers. “An Enhanced Security Framework for Reliable Android OS” by J. H. Park et al. proposes an enhanced security framework for reliable Android OS. The framework provides means to prevent influx of malware by examining the Android OS and file system. In addition, it recovers data once deleted by security breaches. “A Study on SW-Blackbox to Ensure the Reliability of Content Distribution Using File System Event Monitoring of OSPs” by Sang-Ho Seo et al. presents an SW-Blackbox technical method using file system event monitoring to verify the reliability of online service providers (OSPs) that operate file hosting web hard services. This method prevents the bypassing of filtering solutions and the omission, fabrication, and altering of transaction-related logs for the intentional distribution of illegal content. “Introducing Touchstroke: Keystroke-based Authentication System for Smartphones” by Georgios Kambourakis et al. presents a touchstroke system. They implemented a touchstroke system in the Android platform and executed different scenarios under disparate methodologies to estimate its effectiveness in authenticating the end user. Apart from typical classification features used in legacy keystroke systems, they introduce two novel ones, namely, speed and distance. From the experiments, it can be argued that touchstroke dynamics can be quite competitive, at least when compared with similar results obtained from keystroke evaluation studies. As far as they are aware of, this is the first time this newly arisen behavioral trait is put into focus. “Small Target Detection using Morphology and modified Gaussian Distance Function” by Jong-Ho Kim et al. proposes a new small target detection system that detects small target candidates based on morphology operations and detects actual targets using a modified Gaussian distance function. To reduce clutter on the edges of clouds, a median filter is applied as preprocessing. Two kinds of images are calculated with closing and opening morphological operators, respectively. In the morphology operations, various sizes of structure elements are used to consider the sizes of targets, and candidate targets are extracted from difference images between the two images in the closing and opening operations. With a modified Gaussian distance function, small targets are detected from the candidate targets. The proposed method is less sensitive to clutters than the existing methods and has a detection rate of 98%. “Single Authentication Through (SAT) in Convergence Space using Collaborative Smart Cameras” by Geon Woo Kim et al. suggests a scheme to access any ubiquitous service with single authentication at initial stage for efficiently identifying an object moving multiple convergence spaces by relaying the identifiable information along the movement. This is carried out by enabling distributed smart cameras to deliver identifiable information of the identified moving object. The last paper entitled “Time Synchronization: Pivotal Element in Cloud Forensics” by Nikolaos Marangos et al. investigates the impact that the cloud computing (CC) model has on the trustworthiness of one of the main cloud forensics (CF) sources of information, the log files. More precisely, they bring forth a crucial but rather underestimated problem, the problem of accurate log records timestamping. The synchronization of time (stamps) is of major importance for the investigation logs to be used as source of evidence. They show that this requirement is not easy in the cloud context. They demonstrate that the main features of CC render existing time synchronization techniques inadequate, and they provide a list of guidelines towards a CF aware timekeeping system. Our special thanks go to Professor Hsiao-Hwa Chen and Professor Hamid R. Sharif who are Editors-in-Chief of Security and Communication Networks and all editorial staffs for their valuable supports throughout the preparation and publication of this special issue. We would like to thank all authors for their contributions to this special issue. We also extend our thanks to the external reviewers for their excellent help in reviewing the manuscripts.

Supported by maturing information and communication technology (ICT) technologies, the medical care industry entered its digitization age. However, medical information is highly confidential and involves privacy; even legitimate access can cause privacy infringements. Under the current medical administration system, no established application systems conform to the IRB (Institutional review board) to protect privacy in human subject research. To prevent the privacy of research subjects from being disclosed unintentionally, and to meet the “need-to-know” demands of information management, this study proposes an intelligent privacy-preserving administration tool (iPAT) designed to facilitate human subject research. This study provides the principle and feasibility of iPAT that are introduced and verified through a use case conducted by the head of the research project.

Current intrusion detection systems (IDSs) can only discover single-step attacks but not complicated multi-stage attacks. Therefore, it is not only important, but also challenging for security managers to correlate security alerts with specific patterns to predict a multi-stage attack. In this paper, we propose Judge Evaluation of Attack intensioN (JEAN), which inspects the security alerts in the network and provides a probabilistic approach for the projection of the multi-stage attack by measuring the difference between the stored and the actual multi-stage attack session graphs (ASG). The experimental results show that JEAN is able to project possible attacks with more accuracy than Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) based approaches on DARPA 2000 and DARPA GCP (Grand Challenge Problem) specific attack scenario datasets.

Network lifetime predictability is an essential system requirement for the type of wireless sensor network (WSN) used in safety-critical and highly-reliable applications. All sensor nodes in these time-critical WSNs should meet the lifetime constraint at any time instance, else it may cause severe consequences that involve economic losses, or even fatalities. In the literature, clustering sensors into groups is a popular strategy to maximize the network lifetime, but none of the clustering algorithms address the predictability issue for time-critical WSNs. In this paper, the High Energy First (HEF) clustering algorithm is chosen as a design reference model, which is proved in this paper to be an optimal clustering policy under certain ideal conditions. To address network lifetime predictability in practice, the network lifetime bounds and feasibility test for the HEF are developed via the worst case energy consumption analysis. The network simulator 2 (NS2) is used to verify the proposed network lifetime predictability model, and the results show that the derived bounds of the predictability provide accurate estimations of the system lifetime.

Email is one of the most important applications in communication. Due to the convenience and importance of emails, SMTP attack and spam mail have become the most serious problems in email service. A single security technique is not enough to protect the email system from attacks. In this paper, we propose a hardware-based design of the SMTP intrusion prevention system (IPS) with virus detection engine. The SMTP IPS is based on stateful protocol anomaly detection and high speed virus detection. It forms an unified threat management (UTM) to the email system. The ASIC of SMTP IPS can supports at least 4.12 Gbps for parallel detection of SMTP and virus attack.

Abstract With limited resource constraints, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) pose unique technical challenges: WSNs are vulnerable to DoS/DDoS attacks that can easily exhaust rare available resources to prevent execution of their expected functions. Reconstructing the attacking path and locating the attacking source are challenging tasks in the traceback research areas. In conventional IP networks, probabilistic packet marking (PPM) schemes are among the widely used traceback algorithms. However, due to their high convergence times, conventional PPM schemes are not enough for the need for quick and accurate traceback in WSNs. Because marking probability assignment schemes have considerable influence on convergence time and performance, we place a particular emphasis on how to improve both easiness and efficiency for the marking probability assignment of the PPM. In this paper, we propose a novel traceback scheme, called fishbone traceback (FBT), which can be deployed in hierarchical WSN environments. FBT is designed based on the two‐layer labelling technique and a smart marking probability distribution function (MPDF). The use of two‐layer FBT labels is to derive the main branch (‘fish spine’) of the attacking path quickly, while the use of MPDF can greatly reduce the convergence time by integrating witha prioriinformation of hierarchical WSN topology. The FBT path reconstruction procedure is able to rebuild the spine path (for inter‐cluster traceback)viacluster head marking packets. It also reforms the details of the micro fishbone path (for intra‐cluster traceback) on‐demand within a cluster. Both numerical analysis and simulation results show that our solution has better performance in terms of shorter traceback convergence time. In particular, the proposed FBT also includes many salient features (such as the enhanced robustness of the traceback algorithm in case of multi‐attack and reusable spine path), which enable FBT to be a practical solution to the traceback problem in hierarchical WSNs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Advanced hacker techniques make the effective defense at the network security perimeters impossible. Many security solutions are proposed by researchers and practitioners in recent years, most of them focus on how to enhance the functionality and capability of security modules, but few of them emphasize on the assurance assessments of security modules. Security assurance intends to provide a degree of confidence instead of a true measure of how secure the system is. Security assurance should be measured and controlled in the process of security management life cycle. In this paper, we propose a security model, object association binding (OAB), to unify the access control policies and to provide an objective assessment for the confidence level of network security assurance. Based on the design principles of OAB, its prototype called network security policy assistant (NSPA) is implemented.

This paper describes a restoration methodology for ATM networks that is built on top of a pre-planned source routing system in the network and operates on a connection-by-connection basis. Unlike most of the existing proposals that use dedicated spare facilities to protect network traffic against network fault conditions, this scheme simply takes advantage of unused network capacity to redirect traffic from the problem area. This restoration methodology requires the upstream neighboring switches to send messages back to the corresponding sources of the affected connections to find an alternative route. Given that this capability is being incorporated for new call setup in the signalling protocol for private ATM networks by the ATM Forum, the additional development cost and operations overhead associated with this restoration methodology is relatively insignificant. The performance of the proposed restoration methodology is discussed based on simulation studies for video on demand (VoD) applications.

The problem of non-preemptively scheduling a set of n tasks on m identical processors with communication overhead subject to precedence and deadline constraints is considered. A new heuristic with the time complexity of O(n/sup 2/m), Least Space-Time First (LSTF), is proposed to minimize the maximum tardiness. From simulation results, it is shown that LSTF outperforms other heuristic algorithms.