Usenix Security 2006 review

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 missed the posters of the other people because I was busy presenting my own poster. Got some interesting comments from some folks, especially from Sandeep Bhatkar.

Although I think I caugt up on the poster work because most poster presenters also gave a small presentation at the WIP session (myself included, I'll put the materials up soon). I especially liked the ID-SAVE presentation by Toby Ehrenkranz of the University of Oregon.