Editorial:Dependability and Security - Looking Foward to 2006

Abstract

DURING its fi rst two years, TDSC mapped out the challenges and new directions the journal would pursue. With this issue, the fi rst of its third year, I see the journal as continuing to evolve and beginning to gain a high profi le in the dependability and security arenas. A brief overview of this issue’s offerings shows the range and quality of this up-and-coming journal. “From Set Membership to Group Membership: A Separation of Concerns,” by Andre Schiper and Sam Toueg, presents a new way of looking at group membership, giving a simple and succinct specifi cation of the problem and outlining a simple implementation approach based on the state machine paradigm. In “Achieving Privacy in Trust Negotiations with an Ontology-Based Approach,” Anna Squicciarini et al. introduce the notion of privacy-preserving disclosure, that is, a set that does not include attributes, credentials, or combinations of these that may compromise privacy; they propose two techniques based on the notions of substitution and generalization to obtain privacy-preserving disclosure. “An Active Splitter Architecture for Intrusion Detection and Prevention,” by Kostas Xinidis et al., argues that rather than just passively providing generic load distribution, traffi c splitters should implement active operations on the traffi c stream with the goal of reducing the load on the sensors. Gal Badishi et al.’s “Exposing and Eliminating Vulnerabilities to Denial of Service Attacks in Secure Gossip-Based Multicast” proposes a framework and methodology for quantifying the effect of denial-of-service attacks on a distributed system. “A Key Predistribution Scheme for Sensor Networks Using Deployment Knowledge,” by Wenliang Du et al., shows that the performance of sensor networks can be substantially improved using a scheme that recognizes the importance of node-deployment knowledge. “Install-Time Vaccination of Windows Executables to Defend against Stack Smashing Attacks,” by Danny Nebenzahl et al., demonstrates a scheme to detect and vaccinate against smashing attacks, with promising performance results. In Shyh-Yih Wang and Chi-Sung Laih’s “Merging: An Effi cient Solution for a Time-Bound Hierarchical Key Assignment Scheme,” we see that some problems usually addressed by conventional key assignment schemes can be solved directly via merging, with better performance. The past year saw the fi rst special issue of TDSC. The April-June issue featured a special section containing three selected papers from the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, which took place in Oakland, California. So that the dissemination of these papers would not be held up by publishing schedules, preprints were made available at the conference, where they were well received. We expect to build on this success by publishing another special issue containing papers from the 2006 conference. We are also working on a special issue based on the 2005 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, for which the conference program chairs, in conjunction with TDSC Associate Editors Drs. Arlat and Verissimo, are currently selecting the best papers. The journal plans to continue publishing special issues based on these two premier conferences and to start looking into emerging areas to address via special issues. A statistic of interest is that during the past year TDSC received a total of 179 manuscripts. Six have been received so far in 2006. Last year, we published 39 papers, with an average time from submission to decision of 110 days, a decrease of 28 days from last year. We continue to strive to keep the decision-making time as short as possible, while attempting to attract high-quality submissions. On this second anniversary, I wish to thank all of our 2005 associate editors, submitters, authors, and reviewers, each of whom make the growing success of TDSC possible. I also wish to thank the wonderful publications staff at the IEEE Computer Society Publications offi ce, in particular Suzanne Werner, Selina Flynn, and Joyce Arnold, whose support and dedication have helped us through our second year. Here, at the University of Illinois, special thanks go to Tammi O’Neill, Gerssimoula Kokkosis, and Heidi Leerkamp for providing exceptional support during this past year. Most importantly, my thanks go to the peer community at large—with your support TDSC goes forth into its third year with confi dence and enthusiasm.