NDSS 2013 – Program Chair's Message

It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the 20th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2013) held in Catamaran Resort Hotel and Spa, San Diego, CA, United States, February 24-27, 2013. NDSS fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of network and distributed systems security technologies.

This year NDSS received 250 valid submissions (after removing papers that clearly violated the submission guidelines). These papers were evaluated on the basis of their significance, novelty, and technical quality. All these papers went through two rounds of reviews, evaluated by at least three members of the Program Committee (PC) with a few exceptions. The discussion among the PC members was first held online for a period of two weeks, followed by 1.5 days face-to-face PC meeting. Finally, among the 250 submissions, 47 papers were selected to be published in the conference proceedings. This gives an acceptance ratio of 18.8%.

The NDSS 2013 program will also feature 3 keynote speakers. In recognition of the 20th anniversary of NDSS, Richard Kemmerer of UC Santa Barbara will kick off on the first day of conference with a 20-year review of network and distributed systems security. On the second day of the conference, Stephen Smalley of the National Security Agency will lay out a vision for secure mobile computing, including a discussion of the roles that virtualization, trusted computing, and secure operating systems play in an overall security architecture and how these mechanisms can be realized in mobile devices today. On the third day of the conference, Joe Sullivan of Facebook will give examples of several different ways his team has evolved dramatically in the last years to address the growing security challenges faced by Facebook’s unprecedented development around the world.

This year NDSS will try something new. The PC invited another 12 papers to be presented as short talks at the conference. These are the submissions that the Program Committee considered to have fresh and exciting ideas, though they couldn’t be accepted as regular papers. We expect these short talks will bring more excitement to NDSS 2013.

There is a long list of people who volunteered their time and energy to put together the symposium and who deserve acknowledgment. Our special thanks go to Kevin Craemer, who handled all the logistics of NDSS 2013. It would be impossible to have NDSS 2013 without his continuous hard work. I would also like to thank Lujo Bauer, who served as the Shadow PC Chair to handle the submissions that have conflict with the PC Chair. Lujo’s support during the PC meeting was also indispensible. I am grateful to Andrew White for serving as the Publication Chair for NDSS 2013, and to the student volunteer Wenbo Shen, who spent 1.5 days with the Program Committee to provide the logistic supports during the PC meeting. Special thanks to the PC members and external reviewers for all their hard work during the review and the paper selection process. I would like to thank the General Chair of NDSS 2013 Tom Hutton for the leadership at the conference. Last, but certainly not least, our thanks go to all the authors who submitted papers and all the attendees. We hope that you will find the program stimulating and a source of inspiration for future research.

Peng Ning
North Carolina State University and Samsung Mobile