ACSAC 1989

ACSAC brings together cutting-edge researchers, with a broad cross-section of security professionals drawn from academia, industry, and government, gathered to present and discuss the latest security results and topics. With peer reviewed technical papers, invited talks, panels, national interest discussions, workshops, and professional development and training courses, ACSAC continues its core mission of investigating practical solutions for computer security technology.

Planning for the fifth conference actually began while we were in the middle of the fourth. Scheduling of hotels for conferences often must be done twelve to fifteen months in advance. The Applications conference, as we were becoming known (at least among committee members) had been two years in the Washington D.C. area, and two years in Florida. The committee immediately detected this pronounced pattern and declared it to be a defining characteristic of the conference: A new venue every two years would become the norm. For the 1989 conference the committee selected the Westward Look Hotel in Tucson, Arizona. This selection was the result of an extensive search effort by Dr. Joel Levy, who's role on the conference committee was to identify site entertainment and future conference sites.

The committee also agreed that the declining interest in aerospace oriented issues and the lack of support from the aerospace community warranted a conference name change. In order to minimize confusion among potential attendees and to ensure conservation of acronymy, we replaced the term Aerospace with the term Annual, thus becoming the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference but retained the acronym ACSAC. It was also at this time that ACSA along with ASIS became the sole sponsors of the conference; the IEEE Computer Society became an in co-operation with (non-financial) partner.