The paper I submitted to ACSAC (Annual Computer Security Applications Conference) was accepted!

The title is "Extended protection against stack smashing attacks without performance loss"
I'll post more details soon.

So I'll be attending ACSAC in December. If you'll be there let me know and we can grab a beer or something.

Usenix Security ended just a few hours ago.

Overall it was pretty good, some of the refereed papers were impressive, others were only mediorce, it was very dependent on the track (and probably also my personal intererests because my colleagues often disagreed with me). The most interesting tracks were the ones on Software and Static analysis. I heard the Intrusion detection track was good as well, I didn't attend it because I was busy trying to convince my laptop to let me make some slides for the work in progress session.

Stephen McCamant got the best paper award for his paper Evaluating SFI for a CISC Architecture, which was definitely deserved. It was pretty impressive work, I'm looking forward to reading the paper.

Other talks which I found especially interesting: Keyboards and Covert Channels by Gaurav Shah, Milk or Wine by Andy Ozment, N-Variant Systems by Benjamin Cox, Taint-enhanced policy enforcement by Wei Xu. I've probably left some out though.

I'm currently in Vancouver for USENIX Security 2006 where I'll be presenting a poster called "Applying machine-model based countermeasure design to improve security" on Thursday.

The technical track of the conference starts on Wednesday. Today I attended the "First Hotsec" workshop which aims to be a gathering for researchers to get feedback on ideas which are less conventional. I was impressed by the amount of feedback given to the authors by the attendees, makes me wish I had submitted my machinemodel stuff to the workshop.

Hopefully I'll get equally interesting feedback on my poster.