4th CCS 1997

Program Chairs' Foreword 

As program chairs for the 4tli ACM Conference on Computer and
Communications Security we would like to welcome you. In the past
three years, this conference has established itself as a forum at
which research in a computer security disciplines come together to
interact with with colleagues working in the area.

The selection process for the conference papers was extremely
rigorous. We received 64 submissions, and each was sent to three
members of the program committee for review. Some of these reviews
were delegated by program committee members to external reviewers. The
author's identity was hidden from reviewers during the review process.

In October the program committee was assembled for a day long meeting
at JavaSoft in Cupertino. The committee deliberated and selected the
papers that appear in the program. This year we accepted 17 papers
into a program that we are sure you will find interesting. The number
of papers finally accepted is consistent with the highly selective
standards established by the previous conferences, and it allows time
for two panels on the topics of programming languages as a basis for
security and persistence of digital signatures. Furthermore, we have
been careful to leave enough time for discussions between
participants.

The success of any conference depends on the quality of the submitted
papers, on the efforts of the reviewers to select the best of those
papers, and on the reviewer's ability to provide feedback to the
authors to improve the papers. It would not be possible for us to put
together such a good program without the authors and the reviewers. We
would like to thank the program committee members, the external
reviewers, the conference organizing committee, and everyone that
submitted a paper, whether accepted or not, for their contribution to
the conference.

Finally, this is the first year that we are offering tutorials as part
of the conference program. The organization of the tutorials was
almost entirely the effort of Harry Rudin and Phil Janson, and we
thank them for the significant effort made to line up and coordinate
the tutorials.

Clifford Neuman
Marina del Rey, California USA
15 December 1996

Li Gong 
Cupertino, California USA
15 December 1996