I am very pleased to be addressing you in this first message as chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy. The importance of our profession is evident from the fact that we get front page coverage in the popular press, something few if any other technical committees do.
I want to introduce the other officers and board members who will also support this technical committee. Tom Berson has agreed to be the vice chair for the next two years, which means he will then succeed me as chair for 1999-2001 (I leave him the year 2000 problem). Tom is quite well known in our profession, most recently as a cryptanalyst, but also as someone who has the breadth of knowledge to appreciate a formal proof or to understand a TCB design. More than once we have called on him to help determine the outstanding paper at the annual Symposium on Security and Privacy (the Oakland conference), again demonstrating our respect for his technical skills. What fewer people know, however, is that Tom has also played a crucial role on negotiations that have kept the Oakland conference at the Claremont hotel in Oakland. In fact, he is involved in shuttle diplomacy again this year. I think Tom will be an excellent chair after my term of office.
Carl Landwehr is continuing as Cipher editor, thank goodness. The time and energy that Carl puts into producing this newsletter is something that few of you realize. Over the last two years I have found out how well Carl keeps Cipher going because it looks effortless even from the inside: somehow all the pieces come together. Carl, of course, has a regular corps of people who help out on different parts of Cipher, and Carl regularly announces who they are and thanks them publicly. And anybody else who would like to adopt an area to cover or write an article on a recent event in our field would be most welcome. Carl, like Tom, has filled most of the organizing roles of our technical committee, and Carl can always be counted on for his wise advice.
As chair of the education committee, I asked Cynthia Irvine, and she has accepted. Cynthia is at the US Naval Postgraduate School and, like the Tom and Carl, she has experience in several parts of security, including operating systems and evaluation issues. Cynthia recently organized a workshop on curricula for university information security tracks (for more details, see her piece to appear in the September issue of IEEE Software). The reason I am most pleased to have Cynthia chair our education committee is that she holds a similar post with ACM. It would be easy to say that IEEE Computer Society and ACM are competitors, but I think that is exactly why Cynthia is the best person for this role. There is no point in fragmenting our field; quite the opposite, we can do better by the synergy from working cooperatively, with each society providing the kind of backup it can do best.
The chair of the committee on conferences is the general chair of the Syposium on Security and Privacy, who next year will be Mike Reiter. Mike is another well-known researcher in the community, working primarily in design and analysis of protocols for accomplishing tasks ranging from authentication to auctions. As is the pattern with our officers, Mike served as registration chair (and general chair-in-waiting) for the conference, so that he is fully prepared to bring us another smoothly lfowing conference next year.
My standards committee chair is currently unfilled; after many years of good service, Greg Bergren will be unavailable because he is entering a career training program where he works.
The one final appointment, of sorts, is my "senior advisor," who will be Deborah Cooper, my immediate predecessor as technical committee chair. Deb and I have worked together these past two years on the issues that come up in this committee, and I have grown to respect her good sense, judgement, and leadership. She is a very tough act to follow, but I am pleased that as senior advisor she will be available for me to call on for advice and moral support.
Those then are the names of people who will work with me on the leadership of this technical committee. But we require the assistance of many others who help with conference organizing, writing and reviewing papers and reports, and doing all the other things that help advance our technical committee and profession. Thanks to you all, and if you haven't yet helped with some of the unseen infrastructure work, we would be pleased to have volunteers.
I want to continue a tradition Deborah started last year of holding a brief status meeting in conjunction with the National Information Systems Security Conference held in Baltimore in the autumn. I plan to hold another such meeting this year to pass along new information about our technical committee. The time and place will be posted with the rest of the announcements of that meeting.
I am always open to suggestions of what we should be doing more of or differently to enhance the usefulness of our committee to you, our members. If you have thoughts you would like to share, please feel free to drop me a note at pfleeger@arca.com or by phone at +1 (703) 734-5611.
Charles P. Pfleeger
TCSP Chair