We are pleased to announce the publication of the special issue focusing on security and privacy in emerging wireless networks. In the near future, a myriad of new wireless technologies will be deployed, including but not limited to cyberphysical systems, IoT communications, 5G technology, content centric networks, and body area sensor networks. With all these technologies being applied to our daily lives, we will become increasingly dependent on wireless networks as we enter into the future. Although these emerging wireless networks have attracted much research effort, the security issues of these networks have not been adequately studied. As multiple wireless technologies proliferate, there are new challenges in securely accessing these networks with guaranteed privacy protection. In summary, the subjects around security and privacy in emerging wireless networks are unexploited and unexplored topics that are in need of more intense interest and research from both academia and the industry. This special issue gained the interest of researchers from all over the world and our editorial team, consisting of four renowned researchers in this field, has selected twelve articles for publication. This includes security and privacy protection in IoT system, mobile cloud, smart phone, smart city, content centric network, and body area networks.

The paper titled “Performance Evaluation of Cryptographic Algorithms over IoT Platforms and Operating Systems” studies the time and energy benchmarks of symmetric primitives of different platforms and operating systems in IoT system, which is important and fundamental to a successful deployment of IoT systems.

The paper titled “An Efficient Context-Aware Privacy Preserving Approach for Smartphones” makes attempt to achieve a context-aware privacy preserving for smartphone. The proposed solution considers both active defense policies available on smartphones and the temporal correlations between contexts related to users, to achieve an efficient user privacy protection.

The paper titled “A New Digital Watermarking Method for Data Integrity Protection in the Perception layer of IoT” investigates the problem of embedding watermarks in data collected in an IoT system so that a lightweight data integrity protection is realized.

The paper titled “Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing and Collaboration in Mobile Healthcare Social Networks of Smart Cities” studies how to achieve secure and privacy-preserving data sharing in mobile healthcare social network. Particularly, the paper realizes secure and fine-grained data sharing with attribute-based encryption and identity-based broadcast encryption techniques.

The paper titled “Co-Check: Collaborative Outsourced Data Auditing in Multicloud Environment” focuses on the collaborative outsourced data auditing problem in a multicloud environment. The proposed solution is based on Boneh-Lynn-Shacham signature and homomorphic tags, and its performances are evaluated through experiments and theoretical analysis.

In the paper titled “NFC Secure Payment and Verification Scheme with CS E-Ticket,” the security of near field communication (NFC) is studied. The proposed security protection scheme uses CS E-Ticket and offline session key generation and distribution technique to prevent major attacks targeting NFC.

The paper titled “Efficient Asymmetric Index Encapsulation Scheme for Anonymous Content Centric Networking” designs the asymmetric index encapsulation (AIE) to enable a router to test whether encapsulated packet header matches the token without learning anything else about them; therefore, secure communications in content centric networking are proposed.

The paper titled “Location Privacy Leakage through Sensory Data” discovers that it is possible to infer a mobile user’s location information through the data collected from embedded sensors on a mobile device. The proposed attack makes use of the dynamic time warping and hidden Markov model to pinpoint a user’s location.

The paper titled “Privacy Preserved Self-Awareness on the Community via Crowd Sensing” proposes a strategy to allow users to obtain some results over their personal data in a crowd sensing system, while preserving the privacy of these data.

The paper titled “SCPR: Secure Crowdsourcing-Based Parking Reservation System” focuses on the security protection of a crowdsourcing-based parking reservation system. The proposed SCPR uses pseudonyms, instead of real identifiers, to authenticate drivers so that user’s privacy is protected.

The paper titled “A Survey on Secure Wireless Body Area Networks” summarizes the state-of-the-art solutions to secure wireless body area network. The paper provides a valuable literature review of security wireless body area networks and is considered as a good reference for researchers who are interested in this field.

The paper titled “Research on Secure Localization Model based on Trust Valuation in Wireless Sensor Networks” proposes a new secure localization service in wireless sensor network. In this paper, a trust based localization model is provided with resistance to various types of attacks, for example, spoofing and Sybil attacks.

We are confident that this special issue will advance the understanding and research of security and privacy in various emerging wireless networks.

Acknowledgments

We would also like to thank all the reviewers who have participated in the review process of the articles submitted to this special issue.

Qing Yang
Rongxing Lu
Yacine Challal
Maryline Laurent