Journal of Network and Systems Management, Vol. 12, No. 3, September 2004( C  2004) Guest Editorial Distributed Management of Networks and Services Ajita John 1,4 and Burkhard Stiller 2,3 In recent times, Internet Protocol (IP)-based networks have grown rapidly in size and complexity. Among the major reasons for the increase in complexity is the expanded range of network devices and systems, interconnected networking tech- nologies, and services. Intricacies in services have been supported by increased capabilities in network elements and have compounded key difficulties in main- taining Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The evolution of the Internet into a large complex service-based network has posed tremendous challenges for management in terms of functionality, security, the amount of data to be processed, and the types of data. However, steps have been undertaken to improve the manageability of existing networks. Distributed management plays a strong role in managing these networks where the distri- bution of the various aspects of management such as monitoring, configuration, provisioning, accounting, fault, and performance becomes imperative for greater reliability, scalability and efficiency. This special issue is intended to present a selected set of crucial issues as well as their efficient solutions in the distributed management of current and future networks. The first paper “Managing and Securing the Global Multicast Infrastructure” by P. Rajvaidya, K. N. Ramachandran, and K. C. Almeroth examines the important problem of security vulnerabilities of multicast protocols that open the door to Denial of Service Attacks. In particular, the Multicast Source Discovery Protocol vulnerabilities to attacks are studied. Data collected by a monitoring infrastructure is analyzed to understand the effects of some well-known attacks. The goal of the work is to propose a distributed security framework for multicast protocols and 1 Networking Systems Research Department, Avaya Labs, Lincroft, New Jersey. 2 University of Federal Armed Forces Munich UniBwM, Information Systems Laboratory IIS, Werner- Heisenberg-Weg 39, D-85577 Neubiberg, Germany. 3 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich, Computer Engineering and Networks Lab TIK, Gloriastrasse 35, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland. 4 To whom correspondence should be addressed at Networking Systems Research Department, Avaya Labs, 307 Middletown Lincroft Road, Rm. 1N 267, Lincroft, New Jersey 07738. E-mail: ajita@avaya.com 293 1064-7570/04/0900-0293/0 C 2004 Plenum Publishing Corporation