Security and privacy in business networking

Business networking relies on application-specific quantity and quality of information in order to support social infrastructures in, e.g., energy allocation coordinated by smart grids, healthcare services with electronic health records, traffic management with personal sensors, RFID in retail and logistics, or integration of individuals’ social network information into good, services, and rescue operations. Due to the increasing reliance of networking applications on sharing ICT services, dependencies threaten privacy, security, and reliability of information and, thus, innovative business applications in smart societies. Resilience is becoming a new security approach, since it takes dependencies into account and aims at achieving equilibriums in case of opposite requirements. This special issue on 'Security and Privacy in Business Networking' contributes to the journal 'Electronic Markets' by introducing a different view on achieving acceptable secure business networking applications in spite of threats due to covert channels. This view is on adapting resilience to enforcement of IT security in business networking applications. Our analysis shows that privacy is an evidence to measure and improve trustworthy relationships and reliable interactions between participants of business processes and their IT systems. The articles of this special issue, which have been accepted after a double-blind peer review, contribute to this view on interdisciplinary security engineering in regard to the stages of security and privacy requirements analysis, enforcement of resulting security requirements for an information exchange, testing with a privacy-preserving detection of policy violations, and knowledge management for the purpose of keeping business processes resilient.