Emerging Security Technologies and Applications

Due to the quick increase in number of mobile, ubiquitous, cloud, network and communication applications and studies, many computer and communication systems, wired or wireless, have been released to service their customers (human users or other systems). However, hackers everywhere around the world may attack these systems for some reasons, e.g., stealing one company’s business secrets for another one, penetrating a system to show the achievement of their professional skills, preventing a system from providing its regular/normal services just for fun, etc. To safely guard a system from being attacked or intruded, we need security mechanisms to protect our systems and the information delivered between/among the systems. That is why information security has been an important issue in recent computer and communication research. It is also why this special issue is created. This special issue collects a series of papers that discuss different aspects of emerging security technologies and applications. The focus of the selected articles mainly on technical approaches to prevent a system from being attacked, and on techniques for encrypting messages/information delivered between two communication entities. The first article [1], “Efficient and Low-Cost RFID Authentication Schemes” by Atsuko Miyaji, Mohammad Shahriar Rahman and Masakazu Soshi, presents two mutual RFID authentication protocols aiming to improve YA-TRAP* by preventing the system being considered from a timing attack, and by providing RFID with a RFID reader authentication. The two protocols also achieve other security properties like forward security, resistance against cloning, replay, and tracking attacks. Moreover, the computation and communication costs are kept as low as possible for the tags. In fact, it is important to keep the communication cost as low as possible when many tags are authenticated in batch-mode. By introducing an aggregate function for the reader-to-server communication, the communication cost is reduced. The second article [2], “Enhancing SVO Logic for Mobile IPv6 Security Protocols” by Ilsun You, Yoshiaki Hori and Kouichi Sakura, studies the formal analysis on the security protocols for MIPv6, particularly focusing on modal logic. Especially, the authors extend the SVO logic, which is one of the most mature and successful modal logic techniques, to precisely analyze MIPv6 security protocols. The proposed logic is applied to analyze the four security protocols, including CAM, ERO, KKP, and YHSP, to show its effectiveness in precisely reasoning about their security. The next article [3], “A Lightweight Security Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks” by Tanveer A. Zia and Albert Y. Zomaya, proposes a computationally lightweight security framework to provide WSNs with a comprehensive security solution against the known attacks. The framework consists of four interacting components: a secure triple-key scheme, secure routing algorithms, a secure localization technique and a malicious node detection mechanism, each of which can achieve a certain level of security. The framework takes into consideration the communication and computation limitations of sensor networks. Generally, there is always a tradeoff between security and performance. The authors claim that the experimental results prove that the framework can achieve a high degree of security with negligible overheads.