Dear Cipher readership,

The IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy (TCSP) is the volunteer organization that sponsors this newsletter, the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), and the IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop (CSFW). As we enter 2002, I want to take a moment to welcome two new members of the TCSP leadership team.

1) At 2001 S&P, Heather Hinton was elected Vice Chair of the TCSP, a role that I officially handed off to her on Jan 1. Vice Chair is a two-year position, after which Heather will become TCSP Chair for another two years. Heather is also presently serving as the General Chair for 2002 S&P, following her successful service as Registration Chair at 2001 S&P. Heather works at IBM.

2) Terry Hall has stepped up to assume the role of S&P Treasurer starting this year. Since S&P is the source of the vast majority of TCSP income, Terry will effectively be serving as Treasurer for the whole TCSP, as well. Terry works at Boeing.

Terry will be replacing Brian Loe, who capably served as S&P Treasurer for several years. Thank you, Brian, for a job well done. I also especially want to thank Tom Berson, TCSP Chair for the past two years and a long-time contributor to our community. In fact, Tom attended the very first S&P symposium in 1980 (!), and he still attends today. Tom has been a great leader, a source of stability, and our institutional memory within the TCSP. I realize that I have a big task in front of me to continue in Tom's footsteps.

The TCSP accomplished much in 2001. The 2001 S&P symposium and CSFW workshop were successes, as usual. S&P provided a forum for the presentation of 19 high quality advances in computer security and for numerous other hallway exchanges. Picking those 19 from the 107 submissions was a tough task, and many thanks go to Roger Needham, Martin Abadi, and their program committee for doing a great job. Thanks also go to Li Gong for serving as General Chair. The success of CSFW this year is thanks to Iliano Cervesato and Steve Schneider, the General Chair and Program Chair, respectively.

The TCSP also continued its tradition of publishing arguably the best electronic newsletter around for computer security researchers, namely the Cipher newsletter that you are reading right now. Jim Davis at Iowa State, along with his editorial staff, deserve a tremendous round of applause for this. Jim also maintains the www.ieee-security.org web site, which I consider to be one of my essential bookmarks.

Welcome to 2002. I am looking forward to seeing you at the S&P symposium in May and the CSFW workshop in June.

Mike Reiter
Chair, TCSP