Editorial for Security and Privacy in Wireless Networks Special Issue

Abstract

Editorial: This special issue features five invited papers from experts working in the area of wireless security and privacy. The first article, “Trust-based routing mechanism in MANET: Design and Implementation”, discusses the challenging issues in MANET routing security. The authors present FrAODV, a trustbased scheme for securing AODVrouting protocol inMANET using the friendship mechanism. In their proposed scheme the nodes can evaluate the routing paths according to some selected features (such as node reputation and identity information) before forwarding the data through these routes. They have used two types of implementation in their scheme, simulation (using NS-2) and a real test-bed (using JADHOC). The proposed scheme is believed to provide a robust environment where MANET nodes can trust each other in a secure community. The second article, entitled “Performance of IEEE 802.11 under Jamming”, studies the performance of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol under a range of jammers that covers both channel-oblivious and channel-aware jamming. The authors consider two channel-oblivious jammers: a periodic jammer that jams deterministically at a specified rate, and amemoryless jammer whose interfering signals arrive according to a Poisson process. They also develop new models for channel-aware jamming, including a reactive jammer that only jams noncolliding transmissions and an omniscient jammer that optimally adjusts its strategy according to current states of the participating nodes. The study comprises of a theoretical analysis of the saturation throughput of 802.11 under jamming, an extensive simulation study, and a testbed to conduct real world experimentation of jamming IEEE 802.11 using software defined radio (GNU Radio combined with USRP boards). In the third paper, “Adaptive Information Coding for Secure and Reliable Wireless Telesurgery”, a Telesurgical Robot System (TRS) is studied and the authors present a novel approach that uses information coding to integrate both light-weight privacy and adaptive reliability in a single protocol called Secure and Statistically Reliable UDP (SSR-UDP). They prove that the offered security is equivalent to the existing AES-based long key crypto systems, yet with significantly less computational overhead. They also demonstrate that the proposed scheme can meet high reliability and delay requirements of TRS applications in highly lossy environments while optimizing the bandwidth use. The fourth paper is entitled “Reverse authentication in financial transactions and identity management”, and the authors utilise the concept that new families of protocol, based on communication over human-based side channels, can permit secure pairing or group formation inways such that no party has to prove its name. In this model, individuals are able to hook up devices in their possession to others that they can identify by context. They examine a model in which, to prove his or her identity to a party, the user uses one of these human-interactive security protocols (or HISPs) to connect to it. Thus, when authenticating A to B, A authenticates a channel she has to B: the reverse direction. This can be characterised as bootstrapping a secure connection using human trust. This provides new challenges to the formal modelling of trust and authentication. In the fifth paper, titled “A privacy preserving method using privacy enhancing techniques for location based services”, the authors study the privacy issues relating to gathering of location information for non-trusted applications like locationbased marketing or user behaviour profiling. It shows how M. Rajarajan (*) Security Engineering, City University London, Northampton Square, EC1V 0HB London, UK e-mail: R.Muttukrishnan@city.ac.uk