Dear Readers,
In a naval fleet, the admiral's ship carries a distinguishing banner, making it the "flagship". The Technical Committee on Security and Privacy has a fleet of conferences, and the flagship conference is now booking passengers, by which we mean that registration is open for Security and Privacy 2023, the conference historically known as "Oakland" that is now held in San Francisco. The conference will be held May 22-24, and virtual and in-person attendance options are available. The preliminary list of accepted papers shows the broad spectrum of subject matter, from queue contention side channels to malleable encryption to high school courses on cybersecurity. Prior to the S&P conference, the Hardware Oriented Security and Trust event will be held in San Jose May 1-4.
July is the time for European events, and the European Security and Privacy conference will be held in Delft, The Netherlands on July 3 - 7, followed immediately by the Computer Security Foundations conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
The newest of the security conference fleet is the Secure Development Conference which sails October 18 - 20 in Atlanta.
If you've found it difficult to explain computer security to people, you might try a different tack. This month we have Sven Dietrich's review of a book that seeks to explain computer security by tackling the myths that have grown up around it.
Recently I spent some time trying to locate copies of technical reports about security and privacy that were published in the 1970s. I was surprised to learn that many companies deemed the cost of scanning and archiving the material to be too high, and paper was discarded when the libraries were eliminated. My professional life began on the cusp of digital documents. We used computers to write and print reports, but we did not have any expectation of long-term digital storage, so we kept paper copies of anything important. There is no WayBack machine for the filing cabinets that have been discarded and are probably being discarded now, so there is a an information chasm opening up for those few decades between the beginning of the digital information era and the Internet era. Sic transit charta.
Ransomware, ransomware,
We logged in, and we got quite a scare.
The files were jumbled,
The data tumbled,
The whole site needed some repair.
We were prepared, we'd taken care,
To make backups that were copied everywhere.
We'll just write it over, we'll copy over,
And we'll be restoring 'til it's over
Ransomware.
(With apologies to George M. Cohan and WWI),