Proactive Defenses for Smart Ubiquitous Environments

Dear Colleagues,

The recent innovations in ubiquitous computing supported by smart software-defined networks, computing clouds, IoT networks, and software-defined wireless communications drastically changed how we used to define smart cities. A smart city is a comprehensive representation of many interconnected innovations that rely on a vast number of cyber and cyber-physical components to enable a wide range of critical services. Smart cities enable autonomous convenient service provisioning for many mission-critical sectors. Sectors such as finance, health, education, agriculture, traffic, and energy are perfect examples. Unfortunately, the current realizations of such a unique mix rely mainly on ad-hoc integration of reactive contemporary defense tools that are totally unaware of each others’ existence or operation. The lack of self and situation awareness, coordination, and intrinsic resilience within such tools opens the doors for devastating threats and attacks targeting such mission-critical applications. The recent attacks on smart environments demonstrated the clear inadequacy of the currently-deployed defense tools. This issue targets innovative novel defense solutions, mechanisms, and systems that can provide enhanced situation awareness, early detection, and proactive defense for mission-critical applications. The goal is to ensure the resilience of modern smart systems infrastructure, supporting networks, and applications against pervasive persistent attacks and threats.

Dr. Mohamed Azab
Guest Editor

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