Traffic Measurements for Cyber Security

The articles in this special section focus on telecommunication traffic measurements for protecting network security. Computers and open communication networks have become increasingly interwoven with our daily lives and have profoundly changed our societies. While this has significantly increased people’s well being, our growing dependence on an increasingly pervasive, complex, and ever evolving network infrastructure also poses a wide range of cyber security risks with potentially large socio-economic impacts. For example, the increasing number of ill-secured networked devices in combination with growing network capacities enables miscreants to launch disruptive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Within this context, network traffic measurements and monitoring have become a crucial line of research. It enables us to enhance our understanding of cyber security threats and use this knowledge to develop new ways to detect and mitigate them. Example applications of network measurement research include the analysis of how malicious software proliferates and operates, and how it exploits users’ behavior, assessments of the effectiveness of cyber security countermeasures, of the “badness” of Internet service providers, and estimations of the revenues of cyber criminals.