It is our pleasure to welcome you to the third edition of the International Symposium
on Engineering Secure Software and Systems.
This unique event aims at bringing together researchers from software engineering
and security engineering, which might help to unite and further develop
the two communities in this and future editions. The parallel technical sponsorships
from the ACM SIGSAC (the ACM interest group in security) and ACM
SIGSOF (the ACM interest group in software engineering) is a clear sign of the
importance of this interdisciplinary research area and its potential.
The difficulty of building secure software systems is no longer focused on mastering
security technology such as cryptography or access control models. Other
important factors include the complexity of modern networked software systems,
the unpredictability of practical development life-cycles, the intertwining of and
trade-off between functionality, security and other qualities, the difficulty of dealing
with human factors, and so forth. Over the last few years, an entire research
domain has been building up around these problems.
The conference program include two major keynotes from George Candea
(´Ecole Polytechnique F´ed´erale de Lausanne) on automated cloud-based software
reliability services and Mark Ryan (University of Birmingham) on the analysis
of security properties of electronic voting systems, and an interesting blend of
research and idea papers.
In response to the call for papers, 63 papers were submitted. The Program
Committee selected 18 contributions as research papers (29%), presenting new
research results in the realm of engineering secure software and systems. It further
selected three idea papers, which gave crisp expositions of interesting, novel
ideas in the early stages of development.
Many individuals and organizations contributed to the success of this event.
First of all, we would like to express our appreciation to the authors of the
submitted papers and to the Program Committee members and external referees,
who provided timely and relevant reviews. Many thanks go to the Steering
Committee for supporting this and future editions of the symposium, and to all
the members of the Organizing Committee for their tremendous work and for
excelling in their respective tasks. The DistriNet research group of the K.U. Leuven
did an excellent job for the website and the advertising for the conference.
Nicola Zannone did a great job by assembling the proceedings for Springer.
We owe gratitude to ACM SIGSAC/SIGSOFT, IEEE TCSP and LNCS for
supporting us in this new scientific endeavor.