CODASPY

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the second edition of the ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY 2012) which follows the successful first edition (CODASPY 2011) held in February 2011. This conference series has been founded to foster novel and exciting research topics in this arena and to develop directions for further research and development. The initial concept came up in a conversation between the two co-founders when both happened to be at the same meeting. This was followed by discussions with a number of fellow cyber security researchers. Their enthusiastic encouragement persuaded us to move ahead with the always daunting task of creating a high-quality conference.

Data and applications that manipulate data are crucial assets in today's information age. With the increasing drive towards availability of data and services anytime anywhere, security and privacy risks have increased. Vast amounts of privacy-sensitive data are being collected today by organizations for a variety of reasons. Unauthorized disclosure, modification, usage or denial of access to these data and corresponding services may result in high human and financial costs. New applications such as social networking and social computing provide value by aggregating input from numerous individual users and the mobile devices they carry with them and computing new information of benefit to society and individuals. To achieve efficiency and effectiveness in traditional domains such as healthcare there is a drive to make these records electronic and highly available. The need for organizations to share information effectively is underscored by rapid innovations in the business world that require close collaboration across traditional boundaries and the dramatic failure of old-style approaches to information protection in government agencies in keeping information too secret to connect the dots. Security and privacy in these and other arenas can be meaningfully achieved only in context of the application domain. Data and applications security and privacy has rapidly expanded as a research field with many important challenges to be addressed.

In response to the call for papers of CODASPY 2012, a total of 113 papers were submitted from Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. This is a significant increase over the previous year's count of 69. The program committee selected 21 regular research papers which is the same as last year. These papers cover a variety of topics, including privacy of social networks, novel privacy techniques and applications, access control and security of smart appliances and mobile devices. The program committee also selected 10 short papers for presentation. The program is complemented by a key note speech by Giovanni Vigna, as well as a panel (topic not yet decided at press time).