Editorial: Developments in Security and Privacy-Preserving Mechanisms for Future Mobile Communication Networks

摘要

The advances in wireless communication technologies toward 4G networks and the wide use of mobile devices have enabled users to communicate with each other and receive a wide range of mobile wireless services through various types of access networks and systems everywhere and anytime. However, the always-connected mobile device usage model brings to the foreground new security and privacy issues for both the end-user and network/service provider. In this respect, secure, reliable, and privacy-preserving communications combined with constant network availability are essential factors for the adoption of any service or application that utilize wireless technologies. Also, the tight-coupling of these wireless network domains to the Internet makes them more susceptible to attacks. New security challenges emerge constantly due to the open nature of the wireless medium, the dynamic network topology, the lack of common security/privacy policy used by network operators, the resource constraints of the mobile devices and, in some cases, the lack of a pre-deployed infrastructure.