Special Issue: Computer Security
Giampaolo Bella, Ronaldo Parente de Menezes · Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience · 2004
In recent years, research in computer security has become part of all fields in computer science.The proliferation of network computing and mobile computation, and especially the ubiquity of the Internet, has made security one of the key areas in modern computing.Security is a multidisciplinary topic related to almost every aspect of computer science.From information assurance to mobile computation, from artificial intelligence to wireless communication, it is difficult to find a computer science field in which security is not a concern directly or indirectly.Security threats are a constant hassle to system administrators worldwide, as well as to the average home computer user.Such 'popularity' makes security the prime concern to computer industries today.The selected papers for this special issue demonstrate the multidisciplinary aspect of the field.The main focus is on the practical (applied) aspects of computer security so as to fit well with the general objectives of the symposium.These objectives are also well in line with the objectives of this journal.The requirement to be 'applied' is not a restriction to computer security researchers, since most of the research in this field is applied by nature.The papers in this special issue consist of expanded versions of the best papers presented at the Computer Security Track of the 2003 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing held in Melbourne, Florida, 9-12 March 2003.These four articles were fully reviewed and chosen from an original pool of 28 papers from 19 different countries.The papers were extensively reviewed in a process that involved 57 reviewers in total and re-reviewed after the extended versions were submitted so as to ensure journal quality.The four papers represent the wide spectrum of the computer security field.Atallah and Lonardi describe a variation for the LZ-77 algorithm that warranties the authenticity of the data.Gassend et al. propose the use of delays associated with integrated circuits as an authentication mechanism that is shown to be a better alternative to the use of digital information embedded in the circuit (keys).Raman et al. tackle the problem of discovering services in pervasive networks by describing a scalable, access-controlled architecture based on an intentional naming system.Finally, Shin et al. propose the Role Administration (RA) system to help establish a set of roles and role hierarchies; the RA system can be used to build role-based authorization infrastructures.