Guest Editorial: Advances in Applied Security
In this special issue, we have selected five papers from the 6th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2011)1 and its workshops to show the breadth of research. The ARES conference brings together researchers and practitioners in the area of security. ARES highlights the various aspects of security—with special focus on the crucial linkage between availability, reliability, dependability and security. In security research seeing different research areas helps researchers to draw from experiences in other domains. In many cases, excellent research papers are a combination of previously known weaknesses that have been transferred to a new application domain such as mobile devices. Applied security is different to other research domains since the generalization of a specific research question is in many cases not the challenge. Deriving the special case from general case is not straightforward and people often make mistakes in this process, for instance when implementing file synchronization[1] or mobile text chats[2]. Insecurity comes from details that people get wrong. We do not want to dismiss the results of theoretical research; however, there are already many journals and conferences publish this sort of research as Gollmann et. al. have pointed out in their editorial in the very first issue of Springer’s International Journal of Information Security.