“Security-Aware and Data Intensive Low-Cost Mobile Systems” Editorial

Abstract

We are witnessing a paradigm shift in the way mobile devices are being used and operated. What was once a voice network is now predominantly a data network. As a consequence, end-users are now using mobile systems for applications that fall under the data intensive paradigm, such as Skyline queries, streaming information relays, and crowd sourced disaster management. However, this paradigm shift has opened new research directions, such as: (a) Security, as the system now has numerous distributed entry points and the behavior of a malicious entity does not really correlate with any previously known phenomenon (e.g., Internet virus attacks, DOS attacks, etc.). (b) Data interoperability that must cater to the fundamental issue that mobile devices are required to work seamlessly with Internet data, thus requiring revision of protocols, data exchange frameworks to improve data sharing among mobile devices and with the Internet. (c) Sustainable software development that entails the development of software models for mobile devices that have a longer life-cycle and require fewer updates. This also effectively translates into an economically viable mobile system. Privacy and security aspects need to be covered at all layers of mobile networks, from mobile users’ devices, to privacy-respecting credentials and mobile identity management. All of the above mentioned research domains are complex on their own, which makes it a very attractive research area for academia and industry. The eventual goal is to make the mobile systems seamless integrate with Inter and Intranet devices without a measurable performance degradation. Is is arguably required to investigate novel methods and techniques to enable secure access to data, network nodes and services, flexible communication, efficient scheduling, self-adaptation, decentralization, and self-organization. This special issue herewith presents six research papers with novel concepts in the analysis, implementation, and evaluation of the next generation of intelligent scalable techniques for data intensive processing and security related problems in modern mobile environments. The first three papers span the fields of key management, power modeling and mobility modeling, but all share a relevance to security aspects. Cryptographic and key management systems in mobile networks must be computationally low-cost because of the limitations of computational and data storage capacities and battery life of most of the network nodes. Wu and Lin present non-interactive authenticated key agreement (NIAKA) protocols based on the idea of bilinear pairingbased cryptosystem model and Elliptic Curve Encryption (ECE) scheme. The ECE allows the encryption of message multiple times with different keys that can be decrypted in J. Kolodziej (*) Institute of Computer Science, Cracow University of Technology, Warszawska 24, 31-155 Cracow, Poland e-mail: jokolodziej@pk.edu.pl