Cipher Issue 151, September 23, 2019, Editor's Letter

Dear Readers,

Next year's conference season for IEEE TCSP events will certainly feature the usual stellar lineup of research. The submission deadline for the European Security and Privacy Symposium is November 20, so if you want to have a chance at that venue, get the papers ready now. The flagship event, the Security and Privacy Symposium, has a rolling deadline, but to have the paper included in the 2020 proceedings, time is tight. To meet that deadline, the authors will have to respond to any reviewer recommendations with a couple of months. Workshop proposals for that symposium are due at the end of September.

The venerable Computer Security Foundations Symposium has two deadlines: fall and winter. The fall deadline for the 2020 symposium is October 4, and the winter deadline is February 7, 2020.

We have two news articles about security for elections. The US presidential election in 2020 is the subject of great concern because of problems surrounding the 2016 election. Policy, politics, and technology need to find common ground to make elections safe again.

Autumn in the Cloud

When the frost is on the punkin and the comm ports all have locks,
And you hear the hard drive spinning while seeking data blocks,
And the fan blades all are whirring cooling memories in their zones,
And no alarms are beeping, and there's silence on their tones;
It's them's the times a sysadmin is feeling at his best,
With the rising sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he reads the logs devoid of any probes or DDoS knocks,
When the frost is on the punkin and the comm ports all have locks.

(With apologies to James Whitcomb Riley)


      Hilarie Orman