Jim Davis, Cipher's excellent editor for the last 3 years, has become editor emeritus, his time now being taken up fully on research efforts. It was only a matter of a day between my volunteering to step up and my receiving a flood of email about the myriad of details that the editor handles routinely. On behalf of all our readers I offer him our thanks for his efforts towards making Cipher a reliable and interesting publication for the security community.

Why did I volunteer for this? I think I was caught up in enjoyment of the Security and Privacy Symposium, the granduer of the TC meeting in the Claremont ballroom, and the thought that it would be fun. Please help make it so by contributing material for Cipher - conference summaries, book reviews, news reports, etc. With so many people facing restricted travel budgets, conference reports are especially valuable.

Sven Dietrich is the new associate editor, and he is welcomed to the Cipher masthead.

Some of you may have seen that the new IEEE Security and Privacy magazine is associated with an on-line forum for the security community. I would like to hear thoughts on how we might use this for fast-breaking news and discussion.

I'm now using an automated mailing list for distributing Cipher. This is run from a local ISP, and it greatly simplifies the task of handling a large mailing list and eliminating spam. Also, there are a slew of new email aliases for communicating with the Cipher department editors; these get forwarded through the ieee-security.org site and will make it easier to assure that information gets to the right people.

[Of course, it might make it more difficult. Just as I posted this issue to the web, I found that the email forwarding capability ceased to work a few weeks ago during the website migration; I hope this will be fixed by June 9 and that I will be able to recover any messages sent between May 23 and then.]

As always, thanks to our colleagues, old and new, who contribute to Cipher!  

Secure regards,