CODASPY '18

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the eighth edition of the ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY 2018), which follows the successful seven editions held in February/March 2011-2017. This conference series has been founded to foster novel and exciting research in this arena and to help generate new directions for further research and development. The initial concept was established by the two co-founders, Elisa Bertino and Ravi Sandhu, and sharpened by subsequent discussions with a number of fellow cyber security researchers. Their enthusiastic encouragement persuaded the co-founders to move ahead with the always daunting task of creating a high-quality conference.

Data and applications that manipulate data are crucial assets in today's information age. With the increasing drive towards availability of data and services anytime and anywhere, security and privacy risks have increased. Vast amounts of privacy-sensitive data are being collected today by organizations for a variety of reasons. Unauthorized disclosure, modification, usage or denial of access to these data and corresponding services may result in high human and financial costs. New applications such as social networking and social computing provide value by aggregating input from numerous individual users and the mobile devices they carry. The emerging area of Internet of Things also poses serious privacy and security challenges. To achieve efficiency and effectiveness in traditional domains such as healthcare, there is a drive to make these records electronic and highly available. The need for organizations to share information effectively is underscored by rapid innovations in the business world that require close collaboration across traditional boundaries. Security and privacy in these and other arenas can be meaningfully achieved only in context of the application domain. Data and applications security and privacy has rapidly expanded as a research field with many important challenges to be addressed.

In response to the call for papers of CODASPY 2018, 110 papers were submitted from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. The program committee selected 23 full-length research papers (20.9% acceptance rate). These papers cover a variety of topics, including security issues in web, cloud, IoT, and mobile devices, privacy, access control, authentication, malware, code analysis, and hardware and system security. The program committee also selected 12 short papers for presentation. The program includes a poster paper session presenting exciting work in progress. The program is complemented by three keynote speeches by Christian Collberg, Ninghui Li and Brad Wardman. This year's edition also features three workshops: the International Workshop on Security and Privacy Analytics, the ACM International Workshop on Security in Software Defined Networks & Network Function Virtualization, and the ACM Workshop on Attribute-Based Access Control.