Information Assurance and Security J.UCS Special Issue

The global economic infrastructure is becoming increasingly dependent upon information technology, with computer and communication technology being essential and vital components of Government facilities, power plant systems, medical infrastructures, financial centres and military installations to name a few. Finding effective ways to protect information systems, networks and sensitive data within the critical information infrastructure is challenging even with the most advanced technology and trained professionals. The First International Symposium on Information Assurance and Security (IAS'04) which was organized in conjunction with the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Information Technology Coding and Computing (ITCC'04) attracted information security experts representing various problem domains. This special issue comprising of 11 papers present some of the cutting edge research results on security issues such as authentication and authorization, data and system protection and integrity, steganography, security models, risk analysis, cryptography, secure e-commerce protocols, agent and mobile code security, wireless networks security, database security to computer forensics, information quality assurance, internet security and intrusion detection. Papers were selected on the basis of fundamental ideas/concepts rather than the thoroughness of techniques deployed. The papers are organized as follows. Wireless local area networks are increasingly popular as they are easy to deploy at low cost. Unfortunately, they are easily vulnerable to attacks since their signals can be detected by eavesdroppers at great distances. Wireless Intrusion Detection Systems (WIDS) provides a security framework by combining intrusion detection with physical location detection using directional antennas. Adelstein et al. in the first paper illustrate the performance of WIDS using inexpensive hardware. Digital forensics involves collection and analysis of digital data within an investigative process and the key challenge here is the collection of data in the least intrusive manner. In the second paper, Sitaraman and Venkatesan present a checkpoint methodology for a disk that has a Unix-like file system. The task is to record a checkpoint of a disk drive mounted as a file system on a host machine