Last week I was at the IEEE Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy, one of the two major efforts of the Technical Committee. It featured some very good papers, and one major controversy over discretionary access control. The two sides explain their positions in this issue.

At the conference, Carl Landwehr presented a thought-provoking short talk on network security ecology. His thesis is that symbiotic computer viruses may be our inevitable future. Viruses that protect our machine from other viruses and sap our resources to a tolerable degree may win out over any other security solution. I thought about that as I disinfected my machine from the viruses picked up on the hotel's wireless network during the conference.

Robert Bruen has, as usual, found three interesting new books to review for us. At the SRSP event I was pleased to notice that several of the books he has reviewed for us in the past 12 months were on display by the publishers.

We have an excellent report summarizing the Financial Cryptography conference, written by Allan Friedman. This is the first review that we've had in Cipher of this conference, and it is a welcome addition.

We also have a contribution from the IETF Security Area about recent developments in standardizing the SSH protocol.

The Technical Committee has begun a new term for officers. Jon Millen is chairman, Cynthia Irvine is Vice Chairman, and Heather Hinton gets thanks for her service and moves to the distinguished position of Past Chairman. [Ed. Correction: The technical committee officers' term complete at the end of the calendar year; Heather Hinton is still the chairman]

I'm grateful to our Cipher contributors, and especially to Yong Guan, who has a magic touch with the CFP and Calendar entries for the website and for the summaries in the newsletter.