Dependable Communication - Vision or Illusion?

With the emergence of the Internet, computer based communication has become an integral and vital part of our daily lives. The push towards converged solutions like NGN (next generation network), "triple play" or IMS, as well as new ways of providing services, e.g. Web services and grid concepts, will further increase our dependency on this basic communication infrastructure. Although the Internet was designed for "survivability" in the first place, it is not really well prepared to cope with the current and future challenges. While we have learned reasonably well to react to "random" disturbances, our systems and networks are still highly vulnerable to targeted attacks. Therefore, network security will become even more crucial in the future and new ideas for the efficient protection of critical resources - in the infrastructure or attached to it - are definitely needed