SECURITY AND COMMUNICATION NETWORKS Security Comm. Networks. 2008; 1:437–440 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/sec.85 Guest Editorial Secure Multimedia Communication By Shiguo Lian, Yan Zhang, Jong Hyuk Park and Paris Kitsos, Guest Editors With the rapid progress in information technology and an enormous amount of media appearing over Inter- net, e.g., text, audio, speech, music, image, and video, guaranteeing information security is becoming in- creasingly important. Several pivotal challenges in- clude copyright protection, integrity verification, authentication, and access control etc. As a conse- quence, the subject of security protection in multi- media communication has attracted intensive research activities in academia, industry, and also government. Nowadays, multimedia data are used more and more widely in human’s daily life. The typical appli- cations include audio broadcasting, Digital TV, Mo- bile TV, etc., which are constructed on multimedia communication techniques. Associated with these applications, there are some security issues, e.g., multimedia content security, payment security and user privacy. To solve these issues, some means are required. During the past decades, various techniques have been reported for secure multimedia communi- cation, including key management, multimedia en- cryption, authentication, digital watermarking, digital fingerprinting, access control, and digital rights man- agement. Among them, multimedia encryption, authentication, digital watermarking, and digital fin- gerprinting aim to protect multimedia content’s confidentiality, integrity, ownership, and traitor trace- ability. For example, digital fingerprinting embeds a unique customer code into multimedia content in order to produce a unique copy for the certain custo- mer. Thus, the illegal redistribution of the media copy can be traced by detecting and comparing the embedded customer code. Some other techniques, e.g., key management, access control, and digital rights management, are able to protect payment se- curity and user privacy. Taking access control for example, it permits only the authorized customer to access the multimedia content, while some other customers without payment often have limited access right. Additionally, in different networks such as Internet, 3G wireless, DVB-H, and p2p, different secure pro- tocols and algorithms are required to provide the system security. For example, in DVB-H, the broad- cast mode is used for data transmission, while in Internet-based services, the unicast or multicast mode is often used. Different from them, in p2p, the multi-hop transmission without the server is often used. When different networks are converged, the secure system with interactivity and interoperability is expected. All these topics are in active development. Furthermore, devices like digital cameras, mobile/ video phones, graphics processing units, DVD player, etc. are expected to be equipped with such security mechanisms. In these situations, software solutions may not be adequate to provide high real-time per- formance. On the other hand, hardware assisted solu- tions are much better for easy integration with multimedia hardware, which has low power consump- tion, higher reliability/availability, and low cost. The aim of this special issue is to present a collec- tion of high-quality research papers that report the latest research advances in secure transmission or distribution of multimedia content than on multimedia content protection. In this special issue, we selected 7 papers, which can demonstrate advanced works in this field. A detailed overview of the selected works is given below. The first paper, A Secure Virtual Point of Service for Purchasing Digital Media Content over 3G Wireless Networks, presents the secure virtual point of service SVPOS for secure multimedia content transactions and payments. The proposed solutions based on 3rd generation partnership project 3GPP generic authentication architecture GAA and standard charg- ing and billing protocols e.g., Parlay-X guarantees Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.