Message from the Program Chairs: S&P 2012

These proceedings contain the forty papers presented at the 33rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, held at the Westin St Francis, San Francisco, CA on May 20-23, 2012. The Symposium on Security and Privacy (also known as "the Oakland Conference") has been for more than thirty years the top venue for the presentation of innovative security research. This year 307 papers were submitted. The quality of many of the papers made the selection process a real challenge in balancing fairness, completeness, and the reviewing load on the 52 members of the program committee. We used a multi-stage reviewing process, which enabled most of the reviewing effort to focus on the most competitive papers. As in the past, we followed a double-blind reviewing process, in which the authors of submitted papers were not visible to reviewers, and reviewers were similarly anonymous. The forty research papers accepted reflect the breadth and depth of the security research community. Papers span topics from hardware security to vulnerability analysis, to privacy in social networks, using techniques ranging from cryptography to machine learning, to formal methods. The Systematization of Knowledge papers, initially introduced in the 2010 edition of the Symposium, emphasize work that provides a high value to our community by evaluating, systematizing, and contextualizing existing knowledge, as distinct from the emphasis on research novelty, which is the primary criteria for research papers. These papers underwent the same rigorous review process as the research papers. The seven accepted SoK papers reflect on the state of the art and identify new research directions.