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This article investigates how discourses on open networking technologies provide a social imaginary that industry and government actors mobilize in an attempt to expand their control over mobile telecommunications networks. The case of recent initiatives aiming to 'open up' radio access network (or RAN, a key component of telecommunications infrastructure) with an 'open RAN' model reveals how the US Government came to promote this nascent technology to create an opposition between its own 'open' telecommunications networks versus proprietary and presumed 'untrustworthy' networks based on foreign equipment, namely Huawei. While a closer look casts doubts on the benefits of open radio access network to increase network security or to open up the equipment market, this case reveals how openness is an ambiguous notion that can be used by governments to exclude foreign trade enemies, while advocating for trust in telecommunications networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to measure privacy accurately and consistently is key in the development of new privacy protections. However, recent studies have uncovered weaknesses in existing privacy metrics, as well as weaknesses caused by the use of only a single privacy metric. Metrics suites, or combinations of privacy metrics, are a promising mechanism to alleviate these weaknesses, if we can solve two open problems: which metrics should be combined and how. In this article, we tackle the first problem, i.e., the selection of metrics for strong metrics suites, by formulating it as a knapsack optimization problem with both single and multiple objectives. Because solving this problem exactly is difficult due to the large number of combinations and many qualities/objectives that need to be evaluated for each metrics suite, we apply 16 existing evolutionary and metaheuristic optimization algorithms. We solve the optimization problem for three privacy application domains: genomic privacy, graph privacy, and vehicular communications privacy. We find that the resulting metrics suites have better properties, i.e., higher monotonicity, diversity, evenness, and shared value range, than previously proposed metrics suites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of mobile crowd sensing has brought privacy issues into a sharp view. In this paper, our goal is to achieve the predictable privacy-preserving mobile crowd sensing, which we envision to have the capability to quantify the privacy protections, and simultaneously allowing application users to predict the utility loss at the same time. The Salus algorithm is first proposed to protect the private data against the data reconstruction attacks. To understand privacy protection, we quantify the privacy risks in terms of private data leakage under reconstruction attacks. To predict the utility, we provide accurate utility predictions for various crowd sensing applications using Salus. The risk assessments can be generally applied to different type of sensors on the mobile platform, and the utility prediction can also be used to support various applications that use data aggregators such as average, histogram, and classifiers. Finally, we propose and implement the $P^{3}$ application framework. Both measurement results using online datasets and real-world case studies show that the $P^{3}$ provides accurate risk assessments and utility estimations, which makes it a promising framework to support future privacy-preserving mobilecrowd sensing applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicular communication plays a key role in near-future automotive transport, promising features such as increased traffic safety and wireless software updates. However, vehicular communication can expose drivers’ locations and thus poses privacy risks. Many schemes have been proposed to protect privacy in vehicular communication, and their effectiveness is usually evaluated with privacy metrics. However, to the best of our knowledge, (1) different privacy metrics have never been compared to each other, and (2) it is unknown how strong the metrics are. In this paper, we evaluate and compare the strength of 41 privacy metrics in terms of four novel criteria: Privacy metrics should be monotonic, i.e., indicate decreasing privacy for increasing adversary strength; their values should be spread evenly over a large value range to support within-scenario comparability; and they should share a large portion of their value range between traffic conditions to support between-scenario comparability. We evaluate all four criteria on real and synthetic traffic with state-of-the-art adversary models and create a ranking of privacy metrics. Our results indicate that no single metric dominates across all criteria and traffic conditions. We therefore recommend to use metrics suites, i.e., combinations of privacy metrics, when evaluating new privacy-enhancing technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the IoT environment, all devices are connected to each other, and mobile device is considered as key device. But hacking into mobile devices is increasing rapidly with the increase in mobile device users. As the market share of Android OS increases, hacking of mobile devices has focused on Android devices. Although there are many security solutions for mobile devices, they are fragmentary for mobile threats; that is, they are solutions for only several threats rather than comprehensive solutions. There is hence a limit to protecting user’s and company’s data stored or used on mobile devices from various types of hacking. To address this, we propose a mobile device protection technology based on domain isolation. Virtualization technology has emerged to increase CPU utilization in server-class PCs and to run various OSs in one system. As these virtualization technologies become lightweight, they are beginning to be applied to embedded devices. In this paper, we applied this lightweight embedded virtualization technology to mobile devices to divide mobile devices into two areas. Therefore, users can have hidden area from hacker attack in addition to Android OS area which can use same as existing mobile device. There is a hardware-based mobile security solution using an secure element, but this has to be reflected in the manufacturing process of the mobile device. However, since the domain separation technology using the virtualization, proposed in this paper, is a software solution, it has an advantage that it can be applied to a device that is already in use. In addition, to protect the hidden area, application authentication/authorization and user authentication technology were applied. And we use white-box cryptography to get root of trust of the key which is used for secure storage and data encryption/decryption. We believe this is a fundamental solution for protecting the mobile device users from hacking. We implemented and tested various mobile applications operating on a mobile device that incorporates our proposed structure based on domain isolation. There is some performance degradation caused by the domain separation, but it is negligible. According to https://www.wired.com/insights/2012/11/mobile-supercomputers/, the chips for mobile phones have evolved and mobile phones will soon become supercomputers. In this case, the addition of virtualization to the mobile device will have less impact on the computing power of the mobile device, and data protection stored in mobile devices and secure execution environment of security programs will become more important issues. Therefore, our TeeMo structure is a necessary technology to protect mobile device users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid proliferation of mobile networks has made security an important issue, particularly for transaction oriented applications. Recently, Jo et al. presented an efficient authentication protocol for wireless mobile networks and asserted that their proposed approach provides all known security functionalities including session key (SK) security under the assumption of the widely-accepted Canetti-Krawczyk (CK) model. We reviewed Jo et al.'s proposed roaming protocol and we demonstrate that it fails to provide the SK-security under the CK-adversary setting. We then propose an enhancement to Jo et al.'s roaming protocol to address the security drawback found in Jo et al.'s protocol. In the enhanced roaming protocol, we achieve the SK-security along with reduced computation, communication and storage costs. We also simulate the enhanced roaming protocol using NS2 for end-to-end delay and network throughput, and the simulation results obtained demonstrate the efficiency of our protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract For understanding the influence of user security awareness on the long-term spreading behavior of malware over mobile networks, in this paper, we intensively study the global dynamics of a novel network-based epidemic model with weakly-protected and strongly-protected susceptible nodes. Both analytical and numerical results show that the global dynamics of the model is completely governed by a threshold value. Specifically, we prove that when the value is lower than one, the malware-free equilibrium is globally asymptotically stable and mobile malware will disappear. When the value is greater than one, mobile malware will persist on the network, and in the meantime there exists a unique malware equilibrium which is globally asymptotically stable under certain conditions. The obtained results improve and enrich some known ones. Interestingly, increasing the recovery rate of infected nodes can result in the increase of strongly-protected susceptible nodes and the decrease of the threshold value. The study has valuable guiding significance in effectively controlling mobile malware spread. Highlights • Dynamics of a novel network-based WSIS epidemic model is further investigated. • Criteria of global asymptotical stability of the equilibria is given • The permanence of mobile malware over complex networks is studied. • Numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing plays vital role in the communication of wired and wireless network. We proposed masking of internet protocol (IP) address by using the image abstraction of the mobile user. Every image is with independent Gray scale values varying from image to image. User defined mask for image generates address providing authenticity to each user in the network. We simulated the 32-bit address generated from an image and inserted and tested through real world deployment using Matlab Simulink environment. This will provide secured addressing mechanism and will be used as a unique identity to access a network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The secure communication through synchronization between two identic chaotic systems have recently gained a lot of interest. To implement a robust secure system based on synchronization, there is always a need to generate new discrete dynamical systems and investigate their performances in terms of amount of randomness they have and the ability to achieve synchronization smoothly. In this work, a new chaotic system, named Nahrain, is proposed and tested for the possible use in secure transmission via chaos synchronization as well as in cryptography applications. The performance of the proposed chaotic system is tested using 0-1 test, while NIST suite tests are used to check the randomness statistical properties. The nonlinear control laws are used to verify the synchronization of master-slave parts of the proposed system. The simulation results show that Nahrain system has chaotic behavior and synchronizable, while the equivalent binary sequence of the system has excellent randomness statistical properties. The numerical results obtained using MATLAB for 0-1 test was 0.9864, and for frequency test was 0.4202, while for frequency test within a block was 0.4311. As a result, the new proposed system can be used to develop efficient encryption and synchronization algorithms for multimedia secure transmission applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, in the era of Internet of Things when everything is connected via the Internet, the number of mobile devices has risen exponentially up to billions around the world. In line with this increase, the volume of data generated is enormous and has attracted malefactors who do ill deeds to others. For hackers, one of the popular threads to mobile devices is to spread malware. These actions are very difficult to prevent because the application installation and configuration rights are set by owners, who usually have very low knowledge or do not care about the security. In this study, our aim is to improve security in the environment of mobile devices by proposing a novel system to detect malware intrusions automatically. Our solution is based on modelling user behaviours and applying the heuristic analysis approach to mobile logs generated during the device operation process. Although behaviours of individual users have a significant impact on the social cyber-security, to achieve the user awareness has still remained one of the major challenges today. For this task, there is proposed a light-weight semantic formalization in the form of physical and logical taxonomy for classifying the collected raw log data. Then a set of techniques is used, like sliding windows, lemmatization, feature selection, term weighting, and so on, to process data. Meanwhile, malware detection tasks are performed based on incremental machine learning mechanisms, because of the potential complexity of this tasks. The solution is developed in the manner to allow the scalability with several blocks that cover pre-processing raw collected logs from mobile devices, automatically creating datasets for machine learning methods, using the best selected model for detecting suspicious activity surrounding malware intrusions, and supporting decision making using a predictive risk factor. We experimented cautiously with the proposal and achieved test results confirm the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed system in applying to the large-scale mobile environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the strength of data confidentiality and integrity algorithms used in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) mobile communication technologies are improved. KASUMI is a block cipher, which consists of eight Feistel rounds with a 128 - bit key. The confidentiality and integrity of 3G mobile communications systems depend on the security of KASUMI, which has been in place for more than 10 years. Literature survey reveals that it is possible to break KASUMI with a related key attack and very modest computational resources. To overcome the thread against the security attack, we proposed modification in the conventional KASUMI block cipher by inserting the finite state machine (FSM) followed by Rijndael S-box (SR and SQ) at the end of the 7th round. The simulation results are provided in-terms of encryption speed and encryption time taken to show that the proposed modification in KASUMI does not affecting the speed of the encryption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile devices as the most pervasive technology enablers also bring new security risks in cyberspace. However, related cyber security studies mainly focus on technologies and practices rather than fundamentals and root causes. These studies may also omit the current scientific knowledge gained on other relevant or irrelevant domains that may be adapted to cyber security and ignore human nature that is more important than technology and processes. This study surveys and associates all the analogical methods and proposes them to avoid such problems. Several examples on each analogical method are collectively provided to explore cyber/mobile security as a multidisciplinary complex domain and uncover some unknown facts or inconspicuous matters from other domains. As cyber attacks continue globally and effective cyber security could not be established, analogical methods will be method of choice. The study also extends the scientific inquiry with analogy and proposes a new comprehensive allegoric approach that is unprecedented in cyber security literature and questions mobile technologies and their security based on Plato's infamous allegory of the cave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the cooperative secure transmissions in (multiple-input signal-output) MISO vehicular relay networks where the infrastructure node with multiple antennas sends two confidential messages to two legitimate vehicles with only one antenna, respectively. By exploiting the signal superposition and cooperative jamming techniques, the legitimate vehicle near the infrastructure node directly decodes its own messages and is also responsible for relaying messages for the other legitimate vehicle who is distant from the infrastructure node. To combat eavesdropping threat from a malicious node for these two legitimate vehicles, we first provide comprehensive analysis of the secrecy performances and then design optimal secure transmission schemes for both vehicles. In particular, we first derive the closed-form expressions of the transmission outage probability (TOP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP), which offer mathematic tools for separate control with respect to security and system throughput. Following these results, we develop the optimized transmission schemes for two typical secure communication scenarios. One scenario is to maximally suppress the message leak while maintaining satisfied transmission rate. To achieve this goal, we derive the optimal power allocation strategy to minimize the SOP under the upper bounded TOP requirement. The other scenario is to improve the average secrecy rate with system throughput taken into consideration. Corresponding, we propose a prioritized and an explicitly parameterized power allocation schemes, which address the mutual impact across legitimate vehicles transmissions by different approaches. Numerical results are presented to validate the derived theory analytical results and show the performance superiority of the proposed schemes in terms of the average secrecy rate and the SOP performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the evolution of numerous secure routing protocols in mobile adhoc network, there is a tradeoff between the security effectiveness against wormhole attack and energy required to support execution of such security protocols using cryptographic approaches. This paper discusses about a novel routing protocol that offers higher degree of energy conservation when exchanging routing information and at the same time offers a joint usage of unicast, multicast and broadcasting services for faster routing update as well as faster communication establishment required from security viewpoint. The presented solution enhances multicast routing and develops a novel control message. It also rectifies the problems of an intermittent links owing to dynamic topology using graph-based approach. Compared with existing routing protocol, the proposed system offers better conservation of energy and satisfactory communication performance in mobile ad-hoc network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preventing data leakage on the mobile client is a crucial security problem. Therefore, additional control and protection should be taken for the confidential data on the mobile clients that leave the boundaries of the organization. This paper presents a novel approach to the security of the corporate mobile clients, in particular when they operate in the offline mode. The presented approach includes the essential conceptualization and the definition of the core methodology to solve the problem of offline mobile security, i.e. the protection of the confidential data in use when the mobile client is not connected to the corporate cloud. The protection of the sensitive data is provided by the combination of cryptographic means and analytics methods to detect malicious user behavior. The proposed security architecture supports the basic mobile client protection principles: minimized traffic load and reduced communication with the cloud; usage of light-weighted operations and an optimized combination of the security methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications have emerged as a promising technology for the next generation mobile communication networks and wireless systems (5G). As an underlay network of conventional cellular networks (LTE or LTE-Advanced), D2D communications have shown great potential in improving communication capability, erasing communication delay, reducing power dissipation, and fostering multifarious new applications and services. However, security in D2D communications, which is essential for the success of D2D services, has not yet been seriously studied in the literature. In this paper, we explore a security architecture for D2D communications under the framework of 3GPP LTE. We further investigate potential security threats and specify security requirements accordingly. Existing security solutions in D2D communications are seriously surveyed and evaluated based on the specified security architecture and requirements in order to figure out open research issues and motivate future research efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the rise of mobile commerce, companies start issuing more mobile coupons (m-coupons) for mobile users. With Near Field Communication enabled (NFC-enabled) smartphones, customers could now receive their m-coupons anytime anywhere and use them with ease. In this paper, we design and implement a secure mobile coupon system for NFC smartphones. The prototype m-coupon system focuses on the process of loyalty points earning, the m-coupon redemption, and the m-coupon using. Our design guarantees non-repudiation, integrity, and anti-counterfeit of loyalty points and m-coupons. This scheme can be practically applied to m-coupon campaigns and meet security requirements in the mobile environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things is increasingly becoming a ubiquitous computing service, requiring huge volumes of data storage and processing. Unfortunately, due to the unique characteristics of resource constraints, self-organization, and shortrange communication in IoT, it always resorts to the cloud for outsourced storage and computation, which has brought about a series of new challenging security and privacy threats. In this article, we introduce the architecture and unique security and privacy requirements for the next generation mobile technologies on cloud-based IoT, identify the inappropriateness of most existing work, and address the challenging issues of secure packet forwarding and efficient privacy preserving authentication by proposing new efficient privacy preserving data aggregation without public key homomorphic encryption. Finally, several interesting open problems are suggested with promising ideas to trigger more research efforts in this emerging area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT The federal government has long had a need for highly secure communications. The National Security Agency (NSA) is responsible for the wide range of technologies to secure these communications. They realized, recently, that the development times for government encryption technology was not keeping pace with the rapid evolution of commercial mobile technologies; together with a realization that commercial technologies exist to meet the requirements for the federal government. Specifically, NSA has published specifications on their website to operationalize these capabilities. Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC), the NSA term for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) secure communications, coupled with published capability packages allows a developer to field a secure communications solution rapidly built entirely on COTS technology. The architecture, proposed in this paper, will address the rapidly evolving commercial mobile security market and will address fully leveraging commercial technologies to field the latest technologies in the shortest amount of time and at the lowest cost. With the NSA move to commercial technologies and the commercial market moving to enhanced security for 'standard commercial users,' there is an emerging convergence of these two approaches. The initial work has revealed effective architectural constructs to support the wide range of emerging applications of this promising approach from NSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data mining is a process of digging data sets from large data-bases, especially for use to improve the operation efficiency of a company, institution, or an organization. With the increasing cases of cyber and other computer-related crimes, computer and mobile data security has become a matter of concern, secure, and non-contaminated data is very important for data mining to improve the performance of a system. This paper proposes a system framework that is able to collect information and then be able to generate alerts in real time. The proposed scheme is then simulated using the K-means clustering algorithm, which is one of the most popular clustering algorithms to determine the efficiency and the accuracy of the proposed scheme. The paper concludes by proposing further improvements to be undertaken on the proposed system to improve its efficiency and accuracy. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional password-based authentication schemes are vulnerable to shoulder-surfing attacks. Attackers may steal user's sensitive information through direct observation, particularly at crowded places. In this paper, we propose a novel mobile authentication mechanism to prevent shoulder-surfing attacks. Even though an attacker can capture a user's input, he cannot derive the original password from his observation. Our authentication mechanism can be applied in various systems, especially on mobile devices. In the security analysis section, we prove that our scheme is secure against shoulder-surfing attacks, phishing attacks, and other malicious software attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic countermeasure (ECM) attack has been an emerging threat to radar network in recent years. It is necessary to design a secured radar network against ECM attack. In this paper, we prove that the radar network with conventional measurement fusion schemes is insecure to deceptive ECM (DECM) attack. Then, a new measurement fusion scheme is proposed, which shows better security performance when DECM attack happens. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed measurement fusion scheme. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel anti-phishing scheme, image code-based anti-phishing scheme (ICAP), for securing mobile access through an image code. The proposed scheme can protect mobile users from phishing attack and side-glance attack which are threats to mobile environment. The proposed scheme employs the image code as the interaction between a mobile device and a server. This image code can maintain the quality of user-interface and protect the user from the side-glance attack. The proposed scheme basically uses the quick response code, which is a famous image code and has the human-unreadable property. Moreover, we propose two novel algorithms based on image code to improve our basic scheme; image key encryption, and image code identity-based encryption. The proposed scheme can choose one of two algorithms for its objective, and each algorithm has its own advantage. Image key encryption is a symmetric algorithm that can improve the transmission and encryption delay and reduces the power consumption. Image code identity-based encryption is an identity-based encryption algorithm which has the advantage of identity-based encryption. Our implementation result shows that our ICIP scheme can defend the phishing attack and side-glance attack, and shows the superiority of delay, power consumption, and accuracy. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to determine the physical proximity of connected things when they are accessed from a smartphone. Links between connected things and mobile communication devices are temporarily created by means of dynamic URLs (uniform resource locators) which may be easily discovered with pervasive short-range radio frequency technologies available on smartphones. In addition, a multi cross domain silent logging mechanism to allow people to interact with their surrounding connected things from their mobile communication devices is presented. The proposed mechanisms are based in web standards technologies, evolving our social network of Internet of Things towards the so-calledWeb of Things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being an important application of spectrum sharing in cellular networks, mobile traffic offloading, which advocates third-party owners of network resource on unlicensed/licensed spectrum to share their spectrum and provide data offloading services, is considered a promising solution to severe spectrum shortage faced by cellular network service providers. In this paper, we consider a general mobile traffic offloading system that adopts the widely used Gale–Shapley algorithm to optimize its mobile phone users (MUs) to offloading stations allocation plan. We notice that without careful protection, such a system could cause serious threat to MUs’ location privacy, and thus design effective countermeasures based on the powerful state-of-the-art differential privacy concept. Specifically, we have proposed two joint differentially private Gale–Shapley mechanisms with strong privacy protections for mobile traffic offloading systems. The first mechanism is able to protect each user’s location privacy even when all other users collude against this user assuming the system administrator can be trusted. The second mechanism is able to achieve the same privacy guarantee against colluding users, and moreover against an untrusted semi-honest system administrator. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate our mechanisms, and the results show that our mechanisms have good efficiency, accuracy, and privacy protection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mobile communication security techniques are employed to guard the communication between the network entities. Mobile communication cellular systems have become one of the most important communication systems in recent times and are used by millions of people around the world. Since the 1990s, considerable efforts have been taken to improve both the communication and security features of the mobile communications systems. However, these improvements divide the mobile communications field into different generations according to the communication and security techniques such as A3, A5 and A8 algorithms for 2G-GSM cellular system, 3G-authentication and key agreement (AKA), evolved packet system-authentication and key agreement (EPS-AKA), and long term evolution-authentication and key agreement (LTE-AKA) algorithms for 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) systems. Furthermore, these generations have many vulnerabilities, and huge security work is involved to solve such problems. Some of them are in the field of the public key cryptography (PKC) which requires a high computational cost and more network flexibility to be achieved. As such, the public key infrastructure (PKI) is more compatible with the modern generations due to the superior communications features. This paper surveys the latest proposed works on the security of GSM, CDMA, and LTE cellular systems using PKI. Firstly, we present the security issues for each generation of mobile communication systems, then we study and analyze the latest proposed schemes and give some comparisons. Finally, we introduce some new directions for the future scope. This paper classifies the mobile communication security schemes according to the techniques used for each cellular system and covers some of the PKI-based security techniques such as authentication, key agreement, and privacy preserving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CHARISMA aims to tackle low-latency and end-to-end security for converged fixed/wireless 5G networks in order to meet the complex demands of emerging business paradigms, such as Smart Cities, eHealth and Industry 4.0. In this paper, we present the key drivers and requirements towards a hierarchical, distributed-intelligence 5G architecture, supporting low latency, security and open access as features intrinsic to its design. We also investigate the business perspective of the proposed 5G solution and the changes that can be foreseen for the telecom ecosystem. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing secure and privacy-preserving schemes for vehicular communications in vehicular ad hoc networks face some challenges, e.g., reducing the dependence on ideal tamper-proof devices, building efficient member revocation mechanisms and avoiding computation and communication bottlenecks. To cope with those challenges, we propose a highly efficient secure and privacy-preserving scheme based on identity-based aggregate signatures. Our scheme enables hierarchical aggregation and batch verification. The individual identity-based signatures generated by different vehicles can be aggregated and verified in a batch. The aggregated signatures can be re-aggregated by a message collector (e.g., traffic management authority). With our hierarchical aggregation technique, we significantly reduce the transmission/storage overhead of the vehicles and other parties. Furthermore, existing batch verification based schemes in vehicular ad hoc networks require vehicles to wait for enough messages to perform a batch verification. In contrast, we assume that vehicles will generate messages (and the corresponding signatures) in certain time spans, so that vehicles only need to wait for a very short period before they can start the batch verification procedure. Simulation shows that a vehicle can verify the received messages with very low latency and fast response. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mobile devices are used more and more frequently. We discovered that students do not use their mobile devices just for private purposes but also for work related tasks; furthermore, they use their private mobile devices to access various information systems and corporate data that can be classified, or marked as trade secrets, personal data or professional secrecy. Individuals who are granted authorised access to these types of data are obliged to protect them from unauthorised access and cyber threats. In our survey, we tried to find out how well students were aware of the existing information security threats to mobile devices and to the data which they access through mobile devices. The results of our survey and criminal law analysis have shown us that the student population is not well aware of security threats and security measures. Because the user of a mobile device can be held criminally responsible for the loss of data that he or she had accessed by using the mobile device, even though he or she is not aware of security threats and protective measures against them, we believe that it will be necessary to encourage users to educate themselves about the new cyber threats that are typically targeting mobile devices, and also to familiarise themselves with the methods of protecting their mobile devices. To this purpose, organisations should implement internal regulations and continuously educate mobile device users about their safe usage in accordance with organisational standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three party password based authenticated key exchange protocol can sanction couple of clients to institute a protected session key through a server above an insecure communication link. Youn et al. (Telecommun Syst 52(2):1367-1376, ) proposed three-party efficient and robust authenticated key exchange scheme that incurs three rounds. They assert that their scheme is invincible against customary attacks. Moreover, they claimed the scheme is lightweight due to low communication, computation costs and incorporating authentication in three rounds. However, comprehensive analysis in this paper reveals that Youn et al.'s scheme is susceptible to impersonation attack. To overcome the security feebleness, this paper introduces a modest scheme which not only maintains round efficiency, communication and computation costs but it also offer comprehensive security to repel popular security attacks. The security of the proposed scheme is verified through random oracle model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how location-aware role-based access control (RBAC) can be implemented on top of the Geospatial eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (GeoXACML). It furthermore sketches how spatial separation of duty constraints (both static and dynamic) can be implemented using GeoXACML on top of the XACML RBAC profile. The solution uses physical addressing of geographical locations, which facilitates easy deployment of authorisation profiles to the mobile device. Location-aware RBAC can be used to implement location-dependent access control and also other security enhancing solutions on mobile devices, such as location-dependent device locking, firewall, intrusion prevention or payment anti-fraud systems. The system has been implemented and tested, both to verify the server capacity and also the client capacity running on a mobile device. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the swift growth of wireless technologies, an increasing number of users rely on the mobile services which can exchange information in mobile networks. Security is of key issue when a user tries to access those services in this network environment. Many authentication schemes have been presented with the purpose of authenticating entities and wishing to communicate securely. Recently, Chou et al. and Farash-Attari presented two ID authentication schemes. They both claimed that their scheme could withstand various attacks. However, we find that the two authentication schemes are vulnerable to trace attack while having a problem of clock synchronization. Additionally, we show that Farash-Attari's scheme is still susceptible to key-compromise impersonation attack. Therefore, we present an enhanced scheme to remedy the security weaknesses which are troubled in these schemes. We also demonstrate the completeness of the enhanced scheme through the Burrow-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic. Security analysis shows that our scheme prevents the drawbacks found in the two authentication schemes while supporting better secure attributes. In addition, our scheme owns low computation overheads compared with other related schemes. As a result, our enhanced scheme seems to be more practical and suitable for resource-constrained mobile devices in mobile networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current era is the mobile era and nearly almost every person is having a cell phone and if we say that, cell phone count is more than number of human beings, then it wouldn’t be considered as exaggeration. Technology has started to ruin human life at certain extent. It has also started making impact on them. Like every coin has a two side, technology is helping the human beings to lower down their efforts to achieve the target in optimum time and in some manner, it would also be harmful, if not used either properly or with proper ways by people. So, in this paper, we’ll be focusing on mobile or cellular technology and mobile crimes, mobile crime investigation tools & techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing emerges as a way to dynamically increase the capacity or capabilities in infrastructure architectures, software delivery, and development models. However, security is one of the major issues with mobile applications as they can be attacked by malicious users which reduces the growth of cloud computing and complications with data privacy and data protection. In this paper, a mobile-based security agent is presented which provides security mechanisms to security agents as well as hosts. This type of security agent is significant in providing security mechanism to security risks in cloud computing due to its ability to migrate from one host to another where it can resume its processing and service provisioning. Additionally, some of the current attacks are created that attackers may initiate. A fault tolerance at a high level was enabled for mobile-based distributed transaction processing in the cloud. The results show that most of the attack messages were detected and identified, and the type of attack was identified within a specific period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting trustworthiness of mobile services is a fundamental need for mobile service selection. With the popularization of mobile social networks, employing trust propagation to predict trust of a user placed on a mobile service becomes available. However, existing methods based on trust propagation in social networks may suffer from a scalability problem, i.e., their trust computation for two indirectly connected users is likely too time-consuming to be acceptable in very large social networks. To address this issue, this paper proposes a trust propagation method which exploits the peculiar properties of social networks and incorporates a landmark-based method with preprocessing to improve the efficiency of trust prediction. In this method, a small number of landmark users in the social network are firstly selected as referees in trust propagation, and the trust between these landmark users and the other users are then pre-computed. The trust between two indirectly connected users is finally estimated via aggregating the referrals provided by the landmark users. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, comprehensive experiments are conducted using a real online social network. The experimental results show that our method is quite more efficient than the other four classic trust propagation methods in trust prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperative applications for VANETs will require seamless communication between vehicle to infrastructure and vehicle to vehicle. IEEE 802.11p has been developed to facilitate this effort. However, in order to have seamless communication for these applications, it is necessary to look at handover as vehicles move between roadside units. Traditional models of handover used in normal mobile environments are unable to cope with the high velocity of the vehicle and the relatively small area of coverage with regard to vehicular environments. The Y-Comm framework has yielded techniques to calculate the time before vertical handover and the network dwell time for any given network topology. Furthermore, by knowing these two parameters, it is also possible to improve channel allocation and resource management in network infrastructure such as base stations, relays, and so on. In this article we explain our overall approach by describing the VANET Testbed and show that in vehicular environments it is necessary to consider a new handover model that is based on a probabilistic rather than a fixed coverage approach. Finally, we show a new performance model for proactive handover, which is then compared with traditional approaches. Introdu [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With rapid advances in wireless communication, mobile devices and positioning technologies, location-based services (LBS) have recently emerged as one of today's most important applications in mobile networks. To obtain great flexibility and cost savings, LBS providers may outsource their data services to the cloud. However, to protect data privacy, sensitive data have to be encrypted before outsourcing, which may impede the functionality and performance of the data services. In this paper, to make one step closer towards practical deployment of LBS in the cloud, we study the problem of secure and efficient k-nearest neighbor (kNN) query processing over encrypted spatial data. Although there exist a number of studies on kNN query processing over encrypted data, few of them can provide security and efficiency simultaneously. To this end, we present a secure and efficient kNN query (SEkQ) scheme. In this scheme, a new encryption method, namely, asymmetric scalar-product-preserving encryption with Laplace noise (ASPELN) is proposed, which can resist both the chosen-plaintext and known-plaintext attacks. Based on ASPELN, an encrypted hierarchical index called SR-tree (short for Secure R-tree) is devised to facilitate efficient kNN query processing on encrypted spatial data. To search with the SR-tree index, two effective methods, namely, anchor-assisted position determination and position-distinguished trapdoor generation are proposed for the distance computations between the query point and SR-tree nodes under encryption. Thorough analysis shows the validity and security of the proposed scheme. Extensive experimental results on real datasets further demonstrate the proposed scheme can achieve high efficiency and good scalability. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are an exciting technology that will revolutionize physiological monitoring in the coming years. However, the widespread deployment of WBANs is restricted by steep energy limitations. Furthermore, they require acute security measures to protect user medical data. We aim to measure the energy consumption of a cellphone as it transmits and encrypts data in a mock WBAN scenario. We evaluated the impact of various design parameters in an effort to discover the ideal WBAN operational protocols. In conclusion, we recommend an optimal file size strategy, data communication network, and encryption algorithm that minimize energy consumption and enhance WBAN operation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development of mobile malwares makes the traditional signature-based and single-feature based malware detection methods a challenging task. The surge of new malwares with more complex structures and dynamic characteristics leads to efficient fusion of multi-source malicious information more difficult in detection. In this paper, we propose a new multi-source based method to detect Android malwares by emphasizing on the traditional static features, control flow graph, and repacking characteristics. Each category of features is treated as an independent information source in feature extracting rules building and classification. Then, the Dempster-Shafer algorithm is used to fuse these information sources. This method can improve accuracy of malware detection without adding too many instability characteristics that are extracted from disassembled codes, and have better performance in the resistance to code obfuscation technologies. To verify our method, different categories of apps are collected to build the dataset in our experiment. Based on the dataset, our method can achieve 97% detection accuracy and 1.9% false positive rate. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine-type communication (MTC), as one of the most important communication approaches in the future mobile communication, has drawn more and more attention. To meet the requirements of low power consumption of devices and mass device transmission is the key issue to achieve MTC applications security in the long-term evolution (LTE) networks. When a large number of MTC devices simultaneously connect to the network, each MTC device needs to implement an independent access authentication procedure in the current third generation partnership project standard, which will cause a severe signaling congestion in the LTE network. In this paper, we propose a group-based access authentication scheme, by which a good deal of MTC devices can be simultaneously authenticated by the network and establish an independent session key with the network respectively. Our scheme not only can greatly reduce the signal transmission for mass of devices to the network and thus avoid the signaling overload over the LTE network but also can achieve robust security including key forward/backward secrecy and non-repudiation verification. The experimental results and formal verification by using the temporal logic actions and temporal logic checker show that the proposed scheme is secure against various malicious attacks. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent papers (J Supercomput 66(2):973-988, ; J Supercomput 69(1):395-411, ), the authors presented two efficient identity-based authenticated key agreement schemes for mobile client-server networks, respectively. In this letter, we show that there is a serious security flaw in the user registration phase of the two schemes: any authorized user can impersonate the server to generate an effective private key of any other user. We then present a suggestion to overcome the problem without losing any good features of the original schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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