Final and firm deadline: 15th March 2013

Journal Annals of telecommunications - published by Springer, indexed in ISI and Scopus Databases

Societies in today’s world 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 information security issues which are utilized by cyber criminals. Mistrust for telecommunications and computer network technologies have tremendous socio-economic impacts on global enterprises as well as individuals.

Moreover, the occurrence of international frauds often requires the investigation of facts that cross international borders. They are also often subject to different jurisdictions and legal systems. The increased complexity of the communication and networking infrastructure is making investigation of the crimes difficult. Clues of illegal digital activities are often buried in large volumes of data that are hard to inspect in order to detect crimes and collect evidence.

This poses new challenges for law enforcement and forces computer societies to utilize digital forensics to combat the growing number of cybercrimes. Forensic professionals need to be fully prepared in order to be able to provide effective evidence. To achieve these goals forensic techniques must keep pace with new technologies. That is why the field of digital forensics is becoming more and more important for law enforcement, information and network security. Network forensics is a newly emerged research area, and its importance has attracted a great attention among computer professionals, law enforcement, and practitioners. It is a multidisciplinary area that includes multiple fields i.e.: law, computer science, finance, networking, data mining, and criminal justice. However, network forensics still faces diverse challenges and issues in terms of the efficiency of digital evidence processing and the related forensic procedures.

This special issue presents some of the most relevant ongoing research in network forensics and cyber-security fields. Topics include, but are not limited to the following:
• Network forensics tools, applications, case studies and best practices;
• Formal standards, procedures or methods in network forensics;
• Networking incidents response, investigation and evidence handling;
• Integrity of digital evidence and live investigations;
• Identification, authentication and collection of digital evidence;
• Cyber crimes design, detection & investigation;
• Anti-forensics techniques and methods;
• Social networking forensics;
• Watermarking and intellectual property theft;
• Steganography/steganalysis and covert/subliminal channels in network forensics.

Guest Editors
- Wojciech Mazurczyk, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland
- Krzysztof Szczypiorski, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland
- Yali Liu, AT&T Labs, USA
- Hui Tian, National Huaqiao University, China

Papers must be written in English and describe original research not published or currently under review by other journals or conferences. The manuscripts are expected to be between 5,000 and 8,500 words (30,000 to 50,000 characters including spaces). All relevant papers submitted will go through an external review process. Submissions should be sent according to the instructions available at:
http://www.annals-of-telecommunications.com/p_en_publish_6.html

Proposed schedule
- Manuscript submission: March 15th, 2013
- Online with DOI: As soon as accepted
- Expected publication: March-June 2014