5th CCS 1998

Message from the General Chair 

As the general chair, I would like to extend to you a warm welcome to
the Fifth ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
(CCS-5). After visiting New Delhi, India and Zurich, Switzerland in
the previous two years, this flagship security conference sponsored by
ACM SIGSAC comes to the beautiful city of San Francisco,
California. The conference is hosted at the splendid Fairmont Hotel at
the top of the exclusive Nob Hill area, and I hope you enjoy the
conference program as well as the cultural and artistic surroundings.

Once again we have a very strong technical program, with technical
sessions on group key management, anonymity, mobile code security,
cryptography, protocol design and analysis, and systems security. We
are also fortunate to have distinguished invited speakers who will
provide illuminous insights into historical perspectives, the bigger
picture of the risks and challenges for the international information
infrastructure, and a research agenda the U.S. National Research
Council is recommending towards addressing these issues. In addition,
we have a full day of tutorials on both fundamental and emerging topic
areas in the field of computer security.

I would like to thank the program chair, Michael Reiter, the program
committee members, the authors, and the speakers, for their hard work
that has continued to uphold the high standard that is now custom to
this conference series. I also appreciate the effort of the steering
committee chair, Ravi Sandhu, who is also the chair of our sponsor ACM
SIGSAC. As SIGSAC has recently become a conference-only SIG, and all
SIGSAC members will receive CCS proceedings in lieu of the now
discontinued newsletter, it becomes more crucial to maintain the
leadership position of our conference.

The organization of such a conference is not possible without the help
from many people, and I express my gratitude to Heather Levell, our
conference program director at ACM, Shyh-Wei Luan, local arrangement
chair, Jacques Stern, the awards chair, Stuart Stubblebine, the
publications chair, Gene Tsudik, publicity chair, and the people in my
group at Sun Microsystems who are very helpful with registration and
other chores.

This is the third year in a row that I have been involved with this
conference series as either program chair or general chair. During
this period, I have the opportunity to work closely with some of the
best people in our community, and I benefited greatly from this
experience. I wish the best future success for this conference. Now
that I am no longer under "paper curfew" (applied to program and
general chairs), I am looking forward to once again being able to
submit papers!

Li Gong 
General Chair, ACM CCS-5 
Distinguished Engineer, Java Software Division, Sun Microsystems 
Cupertino, California