San Antonio, the Alamo, chili peppers, the River Walk, and would you believe German food? In 1991, the Tucson conference became the San Antonio conference as we met at the St. Anthony's Hotel December 2 - 6, 1991. During the plaining stages, the hotel food service manager explained to the committee that San Antonio had a large German community and suggested a traditional German dinner for our Conference banquet. The committee thought it a great idea, but as it turned out, this meal was not among our most successful. But the conference itself continued in its tradition of excellence.

Committee for ACSAC 7

Conference Chairman: Ron Gove Program Chairman: Ann Marmor-Squires Treasurer: Gary Smith Tutorials: Daniel Faigin Publicity: Diana Akers Recording Secretary and Registration: Dave Chizmadia Local Arraignments; Capt. C. R. Pierce Publications: Victoria Ashby Student Papers: Ravi Sandhu Member-at-Large: Marshall Abrams Member-at-Large: William Bisignani Member-at-Large: Santosh Chokani Member-at-Large: Dixie Baker Member-at-Large: Robert Kovach ASIS Liaison: Elizabeth Mewshaw

A number of committee changes took place for ACSAC 7 including Ron Gove becoming the Conference Chairman and Ann Marmor-Squires becoming the Technical Program Chairman. The complete committee is shown in the sidebar. During the planning sessions for the Seventh Conference, the sponsor, the Aerospace Computer Security Associates, suggested that the conference initiate a Student Paper Award. Dr. Ravi Sandhu of George Mason University was asked to establish the rules for the award and to lead the selection committee.

As proposed by Dr. Sandhu, the award is open to papers authored by full-time students. The conditions were that the student (or students) must be the sole authors (no professors names) and the papers must be first selected for presentation at the conference during the standard review process. The eligible papers would then be further reviewed by the Student Paper Committee who would select the best paper. If the committee concluded that no eligible paper was worthy of the award, no award would be given. ACSA would pay all expenses for the winning student to attend the conference and would also present an honorarium and plaque to the winning student at the plenary session. The first Student Paper Award was given to John Nestor, then at the University of Toronto for his paper Security Modeling Using Hierarchical State Machines. The keynote speaker was Major General G. W. O'Shaughnesy, Commander Air Force Intelligence Command, which is headquartered in San Antonio.

The distinguished lecture was given by Dr. Willis H. Ware of the Rand Corporation. Dr. Ware's experience spans all aspects of computer security. His early work lay the ground work for what became the Federal Privacy Act of 1974. He has frequently spoken before congress on information-related proposed legislation and has written numerous articles on computer technology for protecting systems and data. Dr. Ware's talk was titled: National Policy Issues in Computer Security.

The Thursday afternoon break continued for another year with a walking tour to the Alamo. The technical program included two plenary panels. These were special interest activities that did not have to compete with parallel sessions. Tanya Korelsky, then of ORA Corporation, led the first panel on hosting trusted systems on trusted products. On Thursday, Frank Mayer, then of Sparta, now with the Aerospace Corporation chaired a related panel: Complex Multilevel Secure Applications: Must They be Trusted?

The Seventh ACSAC included seven tutorials, which may be a trend as the Eighth ACSAC would have eight tutorials. A two day tutorial, taught by Morrie Gasser of DEC, Security in Distributed Systems was very popular. Other tutorials were given by Drs. Jajodia and Sandhu of George Mason University, Dr. John McHugh of Baldwin McHugh Associates, Dr. Marshall Abrams of MITRE, David Snow of ITT, and Dr. Harold Podell of the U.S. General Accounting Office.

Several committee members were active in ACM, specifically in the Special Interest Group on Security Audit and Control (SIGSAC). This relationship led to the introduction of a series of special SIGSAC workshops to be held in conjunction with the ACSAC. In 1991, the SIGSAC cosponsored with the Data Management Security and Privacy Task Group, the special workshop: Data Management Security and Privacy Standards. Rowena Chester of Martin Marietta Energy Systems, and Victoria Ashby of the MITRE Corporation were the organizers.

View a complete listing of the sessions at the seventh conference.