Security in next generation wireless networks

Abstract

In the past decades, the evolution of wireless technologies has brought significant changes in modern communication networks through its wireless extension of wired networks. Wireless communications offer organizations and users many benefits such as portability and flexibility, increased productivity, and lower installation costs. However, risks are inherent in any wireless network. As the technologies of next generation wireless networks are emerging, security has become a primary concern in order to provide dependable and secure communication between the wireless nodes in a hostile environment. The next generation wireless networks face many unique challenges in security such as open network architecture, shared wireless medium, limited resource constraints, and highly dynamic network topology. This special issue in Security and Communication Networks presents current research focusing on the standard or protocol related security, attacks and defense applications, security architecture and frameworks, and theories and methodologies in security in next generation wireless networks. In view of this, we selected eight papers on security in next generation wireless networks to this special issue. The papers are either selected from open submissions or the best paper in 2008 International Workshop on Network and System Security (NSS 2008), held on 18–19 October 2008, in Shanghai, China. All the papers were selected on the basis of their originality, technical quality, and significance. Each paper was under rigorous technical review by at least three international reviewers. The selected papers are summarized below. Routing security contexts via an IP network imposes new challenging requirements of secure crosshandover services and security context management. In the first paper, Kim and Shin present a context router that manages security contexts in an all-IP network, providing seamless and secure handover services for the mobile users that carry multimediaaccess devices. The proposed predictive routing mechanism improves seamless and secure cross-handover services. Trust establishment and management are essential for any security framework of MANETs. In the second paper, Dahshan and Irvine propose a robust self-organized, public key management for MANETs. The proposed scheme relies on establishing a small number of trust relations between neighboring nodes during the network initialization phase. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is robust and efficient in the mobility environment of MANET and against malicious node attacks. A mobile node in a MANET must be assigned a free IP address before it may participate in unicast communications. This is a fundamental and difficult problem in the practical application of any MANET. In the third paper, Zhou, Mutka, and Ni propose a secure autoconfiguration algorithm, namely secure prophet address allocation, to perform prophet address allocation while considering the requirements of communication overhead, latency, and scalability. It is demonstrated that the proposed approach is able to maintain uniqueness of address assignment in the presence of IP spoofing attacks, ‘state pollution’ attacks, and Sybil attacks. In the fourth paper, Babu and Venkataram present a security techniques selection scheme for mobile transactions, called the Transactions-Based Security Scheme (TBSS). The TBSS identifies a suitable level