Guest editorial. Special section on molecular communication.

Abstract

Molecular Communication is an emerging and promising communication paradigm for several multidisciplinary domains like bio-medical, industry and military. Differently to the traditional communication paradigm, the information is encoded on the molecules, that are then used as carriers of information. Novel approaches related to this new communication paradigm have been proposed, mainly focusing on architectural aspects and categorization of potential applications. So far, security and privacy aspects related to the molecular communication systems have not been investigated at all and represent an open question that need to be addressed. The main motivation of this paper lies on providing some first insights about security and privacy aspects of molecular communication systems, by highlighting the open issues and challenges and above all by outlining some specific directions of potential solutions. We start with a general presentation of attacks in traditional telecommunication systems, and then we describe the main features of the molecular communication paradigm. This structure will allow to highlight that the existing cryptographic methods and security approaches are not suitable at all for these new communication systems. Specific issues and challenges will be considered that need ad-hoc solutions. We will discuss directions in terms of potential solutions by trying to highlight the main advantages and potential drawbacks for each direction considered. We will try to answer to the main questions: 1) why this solution can be exploited in the molecular communication field to safeguard the system and its reliability; 2) which are the main issues related to the specific approach.