One of the pitfalls of changing the conference venue is the chance for confusion among the persons who typically attend the conference. Our Fifth conference was very successful, but we began to be known in the community as the "Tucson" Conference. This confusion would continue through the Ninth conference and two other cities. This confusion notwithstanding, we continued our two-years-in-each-city philosophy and returned to Tucson, again at the Westward Look, during December 3 to 7, 1990.

Committee for ACSAC 6

Conference Chairman: Marshall Abrams Program Chairman: Ron Gove Treasurer: Gary Smith Tutorials: Daniel Faigin Publicity: Diana Akers Program Committee Liaison: Ann Marmor-Squires Tutorial Liaison: Dave Chizmadia Local Arraignments; Steve Reynolds Publications: Victoria Ashby Civil Systems Liaison: William Bisignani ASIS Liaison: Lewis Schneider Member-at-Large: Santosh Chokani Member-at-Large: Dixie Baker Member-at-Large: Robert Kovach

The Keynote Speaker for the sixth conference was Ralph V. Carlone of the U.S. General Accounting Office. We had asked Senator DeConcini to return, but the Savings and Loan Scandal was keeping the Senator much too busy to attend. The Distinguished Lecture was given by Dr. Dorothy Denning, then of Digital Equipment Corporation. Dr. Denning's interest in computer security extends back to 1972 while she was working on her Ph.D. Since then her research has focused on various security problems and she has published over 50 papers and has lectured widely on her results. She uncovered new threats to information and new protection mechanisms that apply and extend techniques drawn from cryptography, statistics, logic, auditing, and program verification. Dr. Denning's advertised talk was Hot Air and Mendacity. However, when she arrived, she spoke on methods of attacking the data encryption standard, DES, with a talk entitled The Data Encryption Standard; Fifteen Years of Public Scrutiny.

As a change of pace, and to fill up space caused by a decline in the number of quality papers received for this year's conference, we introduced the Thursday afternoon break: a tour, to Biosphere II on the SunSpace Ranch. This giant, glass enclosed facility was intended to be self sustaining ecosystem that simulates the five key ecosystems of the earth. With the advantage of hindsight, it appears as there was more snake oil than science in the whole Biosphere II project.

The technical program for ACSAC 6 was organized around several "threads." These threads and the respective chairmen were:

• Networks - C. Barker
• Implementation - M. Schaefer
• Security Engineering - D. Snow
• Applications - M. Dyer
• Social Issues - R. Vaughn
• Trusted Data Base - B. Thuraisingham
• Integrity - C. Lavine
• Standards - E. J. Humphreys