IEEE CEC 2004 Special Session on Evolutionary Computation in Cryptology and Computer Security The Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), one of the leading International Conferences in the field, will be held in Portland, Oregon, EEUU, 20th - 23th June 2004. It covers all topics in evolutionary computation: from combinatorial to numerical optimization, from supervised to unsupervised learning, from co-evolution to collective behaviors, from evolutionary design to evolvable hardware, from molecular to quantum computing, from ant colony to artificial ecology, etc. Motivations Techniques taken from the field of Evolutionary Computation (especially Genetic Algorithms, Genetic Programming, Artificial Immune Systems, but also others) are steadily gaining ground in the area of cryptology and computer security. In recent years, algorithms which take advantage of approaches based on Evolutionary Computation have been proposed, for example, in the design and analysis of a number of new cryptographic primitives, ranging from pseudorandom number generators to block ciphers, in the cryptanalysis of state-of-the-art cryptosystems, and in the detection of network attack patterns, to name but a few. There is a growing interest from the cryptographic and computer security communities towards Evolutionary Computation techniques. This has occurred partly as a result of these recent successes, but also because the nature of systems is changing in a way which means traditional computer security techniques will not meet the full range of tasks at hand. The increasing distribution, scale, autonomy and mobility of emerging systems is forcing us to look to nature-inspired computation to help deal with the challenges ahead. There is a general feeling that the area is ripe for further research; the creation of a body of work has only just begun. Objectives The special session encourages the submission of novel research at all levels of abstraction (from the design of cryptographic primitives through to the analysis of security aspects of 'systems of systems'). We believe the special session will promote further co-operation between specialists in evolutionary computation (and its current partners such as biology), computer security, cryptography and other disciplines, and will give interested researchers an opportunity to review the current state-of-art of the topic, exchange recent ideas, and explore promising new directions. Important Dates Deadline for submissions: January 31, 2004 Author notification: February 15, 2004 Camera-ready copy of papers: March 1, 2004 Conference: To be held in Portland, Oregon (EEUU) from June 20th to 23th, 2004 Journal Special Issue A selection of the best papers accepted will be published in a special issue on Evolutionary Computation in Cryptology and Computer Security of the New Generation Computing Journal. For further information, visit http://www.ohmsha.co.jp/ngc/ Further information For further and up-to-date information, please visit the Special Session Webpage at http://tracer.uc3m.es/cec2004ss.html or the CEC 2004 Special Sessions homepage at http://www.cs.unr.edu/~sushil/cec/ Organizers Pedro Isasi, isasi@ia.uc3m.es Artificial Intelligence Group Carlos III University Avda. Universidad, 30 28911 Leganadrid, Spain Tel: +34 91 624 94 99 Fax: +34 91 624 91 29 Julio Cesar Hernandez, jcesar@ia.uc3m.es Computer Security Group Carlos III University Avda. Universidad, 30 28911 Leganes, Madrid, Spain Tel: +34 91 624 94 99 Fax: +34 91 624 91 29 John A Clark, jac@cs.york.ac.uk Non-Standard Computation and High Integrity Systems Groups Dept. of Computer Science University of York, York YO10 5DD, England Tel: +44 1904 433379 Fax: +44 1904 432767