Dependability and Security for Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks and Their Applications

Copyright © 2013 Dong Seong Kim et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Wireless ad hoc and sensor networks have received considerable attention due to the potential applications in civil, military, and homeland security and will play a major role to provide a ubiquitous communication infrastructure. To realize this vision, wireless ad hoc and sensor networks and their applications should be dependable and should run continuously and reliably without interruption in the presence of hardware/software faults and security attacks. Hence, dependability and security are key challenging issues and should be incorporated in designing and developing wireless ad hoc and sensor networks and their applications. This special issue is focusing on the latest research in the area of dependability and security issues for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs)and their applications. We have accepted a few papers that address the previous key aspects in WSNs, MANETs and Smart Grid. The paper " hierarchical node replication attacks detection in wireless sensor networks " proposes a new hierarchical distributed algorithm for detecting node replication attacks using a Bloom filter mechanism and a cluster head selection. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed idea is really efficient with a really high detection probability of repli-cated nodes. The paper " A counterattack-detection scheme in transmission time-based wormhole detection methods " proposes a counterattack-detection scheme in transmission time-based wormhole detection method using three phases including detection of wormhole attacks, detection of counterattacks, and threshold update. Simulation results show that the proposed method has high reliability for detecting both worm-hole attacks and the attacker's counterattack. The paper " anonymous cluster-based MANETs with threshold signature " proposes a secure security system with anonymity for cluster-based MANETs and a threshold signature scheme without pairing computation to protect the privacy of nodes. It shows that the proposed scheme satisfies most properties for an anonymous security system and effectively copes with dynamic environments with greater efficiency by using secret sharing schemes. The paper " perturbation-based schemes with ultra-lightweight computation to protect user privacy in smart grid " develops three perturbation-based algorithms to protect user privacy without using cryptographic primitives in Smart Grid. The proposed random perturbation, random walk, and distributed-bounded algorithms are extensively analyzed to justify their lower computational overhead and applicability. The …