Papers From the Four International Network Conference (INC 2004) - 6 - 9 July 2004 Plymouth, UK

The 4th International Network Conference (INC 2004) The papers in this issue of Internet Research are based on a selection of submissions from INC 2004, the 4th International Network Conference, which was held in Plymouth, UK, from 6-9 July 2004. INC events have been running since 1998, and provide a forum for sharing the latest research in computer networks and related technologies. As regular readers of Internet Research may recall, papers from previous events have provided the basis for previous themed issues of the journal. In common with previous events, INC 2004 drew a truly international audience, with authors from 24 countries. These included a diverse mixture of academic and industrial participants, ensuring that a number of different perspectives were represented in both the presentations and the subsequent discussions. The main themes addressed by the 2004 conference were Web Technologies and Applications, Network Technologies, Security and Privacy, Mobility, and Applications and Impacts. The full conference proceedings include a total of 70 papers, with coverage ranging from discussion of applications and services, down to details of specific underlying technologies[1]. The papers selected for this issue have been chosen to be representative of the broad range of topics covered by the conference, whilst at the same time addressing areas of relevance to the journal readership. To begin the discussion, Antonopoulos and Salter focus on the grid and other distributed computing environments, proposing a new model for resource discovery. Their paper, which was the recipient of the INC 2004 Best Paper Prize (sponsored by Emerald and Internet Research), presents an outline of the proposed approach, and presents a comparative evaluation against existing alternatives. The grid-related discussion is maintained by Angelis et al., who consider the environment from the perspective of its security requirements. Specific attention is given to access control issues, with the authors proposing core mechanisms to address authentication and authorization issues in the grid context. The security theme is continued by Valli, who considers the problem that can be posed by legitimate users who have not had sufficient control placed over their activities. An investigation conducted within three Western Australian organisations revealed a high incidence of the available technology being misused for nonbusiness purposes, and of end-users employing covert techniques to hide their actions. Such findings demonstrate the need to devote more attention towards combating the insider threat, and a relevant contribution is therefore provided by Venter et al., who propose a means of safeguarding private information against end-user misuse, using a development of intrusion detection system (IDS) technologies. Their discussion introduces the issues of privacy and privacyenhancing technologies, before considering the opportunity for applying IDS approaches and proposing