Communications security is the discipline of preventing unauthorized interceptors from accessing telecommunications in an intelligible form, while still delivering content to the intended recipients. It is often referred to by the abbreviation COMSEC. The field includes cryptosecurity, transmission security, and physical security of COMSEC equipment. COMSEC is used to protect both classified and unclassified traffic on military communications networks, including voice, video, and data. It is used for both analog and digital applications, as well as both wired and wireless links.

This feature topic will benefit the research community towards identifying challenges and disseminating the latest methodologies and solutions to communications security issues. Its objective is to publish high-quality articles presenting open issues, algorithms, protocols, policies, frameworks, standards, and solutions for communications related to security and privacy. Only technical papers describing previously unpublished, original, state-of-the-art research, and not currently under review by a conference or a journal will be considered.

Original research articles as well as review articles which address state-of-the-art research and state-of-the-practice industry experiences are welcomed. We solicit papers in a variety of topics related to communications security.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Authorization and access control for communications services
• Denial of service prevention schemes for communications
• Reliability and availability issues on communications
• Penetration testing, intrusion detection, and prevention
• End-to-end security solutions
• Cryptographic protocols for communications
• Voice security
• Signaling security and privacy
• Multimedia application security and privacy analysis
• Multimedia communication platforms vulnerabilities and attacks
• Security and privacy in mobile communication services
• Smartphone multimedia apps security and privacy
• Social networking security and privacy
• Trust establishment in communications
• Privacy and identity management
• Privacy enhancing technologies for communications
• Privacy models for communications
• Security and privacy assessment for communications
• Security policies
• Auditing, verification, and validation of communications services
• Cybersecurity issues affecting communications
• VoIP peering security issues