Call for Papers

Submissions will be subject to the peer-review methodology for refereed papers. Articles should be 6,000 words, maximum, with a maximum of 15 references. Articles should be understandable to a broad audience of people interested in security and privacy. The writing should be down to earth, practical, and original. Authors should not assume that the audience will have specialized experience in a particular subfield. All accepted articles will be edited according to the IEEE Computer Society style guide.

For information on submitting an article, please visit our Author Resources page.

Underground Economics (Jan/Feb 2010)

Guest Editor: Daniel G. Conway

Please email the guest editor with a brief description of the article you plan to submit by 1 June 2009.

Final submissions due 15 June 2009

Economies are generally described by measures of production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.  This system is impacted by technology, culture, social organization, geography, natural resources, and various formal and informal regulations and incentive structures. 

The economy of the Internet underground is in many ways simpler, as social organization, geography, natural resources, and regulations are relaxed at best, leaving technology, culture, and incentives as the dominant influences. Formal economies have always criticized underground economies as being stagnant and void of innovation, but the Internet underground appears to be neither.  The inability to levy taxes perhaps motivates some of these criticisms: you can only tax what you can measure, and measuring underground economies has proven to be quite difficult.

Participants in underground economies often start with hobbies and sustenance activities and upon success (demand discovery), these activities become better organized and more sophisticated.  Recently, we've witnessed this change in the goals and modes of operation of malicious hackers. As miscreants realize the potential monetary gains associated with Internet fraud, there's been a shift from "hacking for fun" (or bragging rights and celebrity within and outside the hacker community) to "hacking for profit."  This shift has been leveraged and supported by more traditional crime organizations, which eventually realized the Internet's potential for their endeavors.

The integration of sophisticated computer attacks with well-established fraud mechanisms devised by organized groups has resulted in an underground economy that trades compromised hosts, personal information, and services in a way similar to other legitimate economies. This expanding underground economy makes it possible to significantly increase the scale of the frauds carried out on the Internet and allows criminals to reach millions of potential victims. Also, criminals are taking full advantage of sophisticated mechanisms, such as the service bots used on IRC channels to automatically verify stolen credit-card numbers, the use of e-casinos to launder money, and the use of fast-flux networks to create attack-resilient services.

This call for papers for a special issue of IEEE Security & Privacy magazine aims to present works on the issues related to the underground economy. Topics of interest include

• detection and countermeasures against frauds, scams, and phishing;
• analysis of the underground economy infrastructure;
• analysis of the actors of the underground economy and their relationships/social networks; and
• pricing, supply and demand, scarcity of resources, labor supply, and other traditional economic measures.

Reliability and Security of Handheld Devices

Guest editors: Bret Michael, Naval Postgraduate School and John Viega, McAfee

Please email the guest editors with a brief description of the article you plan to submit by 24 June 2009.

Final submissions due 8 July 2009

Society has become dependent on handheld and mobile devices for mission- and safety-critical applications; they've become pervasive for non-critical applications. However, they've also had many reliability and security problems, most notably with their interaction with other systems.

We invite articles for this special issue that address the reliability and/or security for handheld devices. Articles can focus on software, hardware, the human-computer interface, or some combination thereof. Challenges we would like to see addressed in the special issue include:

• Addressing the so-called "multivendor problem" (one vendor supplying the device's operating system while others provide the devic's varied functions); that is, trying to detect faults and trace them to the source.
• Efficiently handling problems shared by the desktop, with technologies such as anti-virus protection and data-loss prevention.
• Assessing and improving mobile devices' hardware and software reliability over the full range of operating conditions and network infrastructures they use to communicate.
• Conducting reliability and security analyses in an economical fashion given the devices' typically short lifespan.
• Providing for secure handoff between network infrastructures (EVDO to 802.11 to 802.16 to Bluetooth).
• Managing such devices' key distribution and enforcing security policies.
• Securely updating their firmware and software.