Abstract-The flexibility and mobility of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) have made them increasingly popular in a wide range of use cases. To protect these networks, security protocols have been developed to protect routing and application data. However, these protocols only protect routes or communication, not both. Both secure routing and communication security protocols must be implemented to provide full protection. The use of communication security protocols originally developed for wireline and WiFi networks can also place a heavy burden on the limited network resources of a MANET. To address these issues, a novel secure framework (SUPERMAN) is proposed. The framework is designed to allow existing network and routing protocols to perform their functions, whilst providing node authentication, access control, and communication security mechanisms. This paper presents a novel security framework for MANETs, SUPERMAN. Simulation results comparing SUPERMAN with IPsec, SAODV, and SOLSR are provided to demonstrate the proposed frameworks suitability for wireless communication security.

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The cost of a single zero-day network worm outbreak on the global Internet has been estimated at US$2.6 billion. In addition, zero-day network worm outbreaks have been observed that spread at a significant pace across the Internet, with an observed infection proportion of more than 90% of vulnerable hosts within 10 minutes. The threat posed by such fast-spreading malware to defence systems and national security is therefore significant, particularly given the fact that network operator/administrator intervention is not likely to take effect within the typical epidemiological timescale of such infections.An accepted technology that is used to research the security threat presented by zero-day worms is that of simulation systems; however, only a subset of these focus on the Internet and issues persist regarding how representative these are of the Internet. The design of a novel simulator developed to address these issues, the Internet Worm Simulator (IWS), is presented along with experimental results for a selection of previous worm outbreaks compared against observed, empirical data and hypothetical outbreak scenarios. Based on a finite state machine for each network host, the IWS incorporates the dynamic, heterogeneous characteristics of the Internet and, on a single workstation, is able to simulate an IPv4-sized network.Based on the analysis presented, the authors conclude that the IWS has the capability to simulate zero-day worm epidemiology on the dynamic, heterogeneous Internet for a variety of scenarios. These include simulating previous worm outbreaks that demonstrate random-scanning and hit list behaviour, as well as hypothetical scenarios that include a large susceptible populous and stealth-like behaviour.

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One of the factors that affect the success of Evolutionary Robotics (ER) is the way fitness functions are designed to operate. While needs-based custom fitness functions have been developed, most of the time they have been defined in simpler mathematical functions to reduce the computation time. In this paper, we hypothesize that an incremental fitness function based on established techniques in specific task domains in robotics will aid the evolution process. An A-star algorithm-based fitness function for path planning is designed and implemented for evolving the body plans and controllers of robots for navigation and obstacle avoidance tasks. It has been shown that using this concept, fitter robots have evolved in most cases when compared to simple distance-only based fitness functions. However, due to variable performance of the evolver with the A-star fitness function, the results are inconclusive. We also identify problems associated with the fitness function and make recommendations for designing future fitness functions based on observations of the experiments.