Security, trust and confidence can certainly be considered as the most important parts of the information society. Being protected when working, learning, shopping or doing any kind of e-commerce is of great value to citizens, students, business people, employees and employers. Commercial companies and their clients want to do business over the Internet in a secure way; business managers when having meetings by videoconferencing tools require the exchanged information to be protected; the publishing industry is concerned with the protection of copyright; hospital patients have a right to privacy; etc. There is no area in the information society that can proliferate without extensive use of services that provide satisfactory protection and privacy of data or personality. This book presents a review of current perspectives as well as the latest developments in the area of communications and multimedia security. It examines requirements, issues and solutions pertinent to securing information networks, and identifies future security-related research challenges.A wide spectrum of topics is discussed, including: applied cryptography, biometry, communication systems security, applications security, mobile security, distributed systems security, digital watermarking and digital signatures.
