In today’s world, societies are becoming more and more dependent on open networks such as the Internet – where commercial activities, business transactions and government services are realized. This has led to the fast development of new cyber threats and numerous information security issues which cyber criminals exploit. The inability to provide trusted secure services in contemporary computer network technologies has a tremendous unfavorable socio-economic impact on global enterprises as well as individuals.

Current communication networks are increasingly becoming pervasive, complex, and ever-evolving due to factors like enormous growth in the number of network users, continuous appearance of network applications, increasing amount of data transferred, and diversity of user behaviors. Understanding and measuring traffic in such networks is a not only difficult yet vital task for network management but recently also for cyber security purposes.

Network traffic measuring and monitoring can, enable the analysis of the spreading of malicious software and its capabilities or can help us understand the nature of various network threats including those that exploit users’ behavior and other user’s sensitive information. On the other hand, network traffic investigation can also help us assess the effectiveness of the existing countermeasures or contribute to building new, better ones. Recently, traffic measurements have been utilized in the area of economics of cyber security e.g. to assess ISP “badness” or to estimate the revenue of cyber criminals.

The aim of this feature topic is to bring together the research accomplishments by academic and industry researchers. The other goal is to show the latest research results in the field of cyber security and understand how traffic measurements can influence it. We encourage prospective authors to submit related distinguished research papers on the subject of both theoretical approaches and practical case reviews.

This special issue presents some of the most relevant ongoing research in cyber security seen from the traffic measurements perspective. Topics include, but are not limited to the following:

- Measurements for network incidents response, investigation and evidence handling
- Measurements for network anomalies detection
- Measurements for economics of cyber security
- Network traffic analysis to discover the nature and evolution of the cyber security threats
- Measurements for assessing the effectiveness of the threats detection/prevention methods and countermeasures
- Novel passive, active and hybrid measurements techniques for cyber security purposes
- Traffic classification and topology discovery tools for monitoring the evolving status of the network from the cyber security perspective
- Correlation of measurements across multiple layers, protocols or networks for cyber security purposes
- Novel visualization approaches to detect network attacks and other threats
- Analysis of network traffic to provide new insights about network structure and behavior from the security perspective
- Measurements of network protocol and applications behavior and its impact on cyber security and users’ privacy
- Measurements related to network security and privacy


IMPORTANT DATES

Manuscript Submission: October 1, 2016
Decision Notification: February 1, 2017
Final Manuscripts Due: April 15, 2017
Publication Date: July 2017


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Articles should be tutorial in nature and written in a style comprehensible and accessible to readers outside the specialty of the article. Authors must follow the IEEE Communications Magazine's guidelines for preparation of their manuscripts. Complete guidelines for prospective authors can be found at http://www.comsoc.org/commag/paper-submission-guidelines.

It is important to note that the IEEE Communications Magazine strongly limits mathematical content, the combined number of figures and tables to six, and archival references to fifteen. Paper length (Introduction through conclusions, excluding figures, tables and captions) should not exceed 4,500 words. All articles to be considered for publication must be submitted through the IEEE Manuscript Central site (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/commag-ieee) to the "July 2017 / Traffic Measurements for Cyber Security" category by the manuscript submission deadline according to the schedule shown above.