[ACSAC History]

1992: Return To San Antonio

The conference had temporarily become the "San Antonio" conference and the committee planned to return to the St. Anthony for 1992. The slippage of the calendar led us to begin the Eighth ACSAC on November 30. This was the earliest date that the conference had started and conflicted with Thanksgiving weekend travel. The committee agreed to not start this early in future conferences. The conference committee added two new positions with the Eighth conference. These positions were Recording Secretary (which in the past had been combined with Publicity or Registration) and the Video Tape Producer.

Committee for ACSAC 8
Conference Chairman: Ron Gove
Program Chairman: Ann Marmor-Squires
Treasurer: Gary Smith
Tutorials: Daniel Faigin
Publicity: Diana Akers
Publications: Victoria Ashby
Recording Secretary: Noelle McAuliffe
Registration: Dave Chizmadia
Video Tape Producer: Robin Medlock
Student Papers: Ravi Sandhu
ACSA Chairman of the Board: Marshall Abrams
ACSA Treasurer: William Bisignani
Member-at-Large: Santosh Chokani
Member-at-Large: Dixie Baker
Member-at-Large: Robert Kovach
Member-at-Large: Dr. Joel Levy

This year also introduced a major change in the conference's independence. ACSA now became the conferences only financial sponsor. The IEEE Computer Society and ACM remained as in co-operation with (non-financial) partners. George Mason University, Center for Professional Development handled registration, which had been done by ASIS when they were financial partners in the conference.

For 1992, ACSA selected James P. Anderson, James P. Anderson Co., as the distinguished lecturer. Mr. Anderson has been an independent consultant n computer security since 1966. His work has centered on the research and development activities for United States Government agencies that needed to make computer security a reality. He contributed to the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC) and the draft of the Network Interpretation of the TCSEC. His lecture, Myths and Mythtakes of Computer Security addresses a broad perspective and enduring issues in the protection of information. The keynote speaker was Daniel J. Ryan, who was, at the time of the conference, the Executive Assistant for Information Systems Security to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense. This position is currently held by Barbara Valeri, who is the keynote speaker for ACSAC 10. Mr. Ryan is currently a Corporate Vice President with Science Applications International, Inc.

The ACM SIGSAC once again sponsored a special workshop in conjunction with ACSAC 8. This workshop, Issues 92: Distributed Data Management Security considered the problems of security in distributed systems and whether the problems are fundamentally different or may be best understood using the methods developed for stand alone systems.

As a special tutorial, Ron Ross, then of the Department of Defense, provided an overview of the new U.S. Information Protection Criteria. This new criteria was to be a Federal Information Processing Standard on developing, specifying, and evaluating information technology security products. This effort was subsumed in the International Common Criteria, first released in North America at the 10th ACSAC.

View a complete listing of the sessions at the eighth conference.