Dear Readers,
This is the time of year when security researchers around the world choose which of their stellar projects will be submitted for consideration for the Security and Privacy Symposium. The deadline for papers is in November (see the Calendar for details). The number of papers submitted to the program committee keeps increasing, and the symposium has responded by accepting a few more papers each year. The program now stands at 3 full days. The program chairs have emphasized that the program has room for "risky" papers, as well as the solid, deeply researched, and well-accepted research that is the hallmark of the event.
The first round of workshop proposals for SPW, the workshops of Security and Privacy, are now in hand, and the program committee is considering them. Next year the workshop program will probably expand yet again, and it will move to a new timeslot on the weekend preceding the research symposium. The new venue for both events will be San Jose, California.
The revelations from Edward Snowden continue to dominate security news, and fallout just keeps going wider. We have several news items related to this, and we also note that much of the information was revealed over a year ago in a the magazine Wired in an article by James Bamford.
This month we have a book review from Richard Austin on the subject of network security monitoring, something that is of crucial importance in a world in which so many cybersecurity measures are weak or undermined.
For Halloween, I'm dressing as an NSA encryption suite,
Hilarie Orman