ACSAC 2008

Anaheim was a perfect location - they supplied excellent facilities at the Sheraton Park hotel, great weather and even fireworks (well, in Disneyland, but we could see them from our hotel every night).

The conference week started with 4 full-day and 2 half-day tutorials held on Monday-Tuesday - they were well attended and highly educational (not to mention the continued education credits they offered as well). The Virtualization Security workshop on Tuesday was packed - both in terms of most recent information from leading experts and in terms of audience.

Sami Saydjari opened the conference with his mesmerizing keynote calling for a "Cyber Manhattan Project" - a project already featured in many national newspapers and TV segments, due to its novelty and eye-opening qualities. The talk raised high interest among ACSAC attendees and a follow-up note from Sami (on what *we* can do now) can be found below. Thursday's keynote speaker was Whitfield Diffie who presented crypto insights in a web-based world. Friday morning had two Classic Papers - Barbara Fraser and Steve Crocker gave today's view on RFC 1281, and Stephanie Forrest talked about immunology-based security and its place among today's security solutions.

The technical tracks on Wednesday - Friday included technical sessions of refereed papers, case studies sessions, and several panels, as well as the popular Works in Progress session. All presentations were well received, and their high quality and technical novelty encouraged animate discussions during (and even after) the sessions.

The 2008 ACSAC awards for Best Student Paper and Best Paper were awarded, after careful consideration by the Student Awards Committee and Program Committee respectively, to the following recipients:

• Best Student Paper: Arati Baliga (Rutgers University) for the paper: Automatic Inference and Enforcement of Kernel Data Structure Invariants , Arati Baliga, Vinod Ganapathy, Liviu Iftode - Rutgers University
• Best Paper: Soft-Timer Driven Transient Kernel Control Flow Attacks and Defense , Jinpeng Wei, Bryan Payne, Jon Giffin, Calton Pu - Georgia Institute of Technology

Our congratulations to the 2008 award winners!

Last but not least, a group of conference attendees took the Friday afternoon trip to Dana Point and went on a chartered catamaran on the Pacific Ocean. No whales passing by, but large pods of dolphins and sea lions delighted us at length and made the trip an unforgettable ACSAC memory.

Overall, the 2008 ACSAC was an excellent conference, and we made its materials available online. The Conference Committee thanks all attendees, authors and presenters for their participation!