Message from the General Chair - SPW 2012

This is the first year that we have a logistically separate, yet geographically adjacent, event from our longtime flagship conference, the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (known to insiders as Oakland), now in its 33rd year. This supports the growth of interest in workshops at Oakland that had been an opportunity to diversify the topics beyond the main conference. Examples are the Web Services Workshop in 2006, the workshop ``veteran'' Web 2.0 Security and Privacy Workshop (W2SP) since 2007, and SADFE, the digital forensics workshop that stayed with Oakland from 2008 to 2011. A separate steering committee was founded that worked to shape this new event over the last year with the main conference organizing committee. A two-stage call for workshop proposals was issued that generated many applications. A long deliberation among the steering committee finally yielded a total of five workshops: the Web 2.0 Security and Privacy workshop (W2SP), the Mobile Security Technology workshop (MoST), the Workshop on Semantic Computing and Security (WSCS), the Workshop on Insider Threat (WRIT), and last but not least the Workshop on Special Aspects of Cyber Physical Systems: Trustworthy Embedded Systems (TrustED). We thank all the workshop proposal submitters for their efforts, and hope that those who did not make it in understand that we could only fit so many workshops into two days without overcrowding the space. This brings us to the next significant change for Oakland veterans: Oakland is no longer in Oakland, and neither are the workshops. Yes, after many cherished years at our former and smaller location, we had to find a new venue that allowed for expansion, namely for these workshops. In collaboration with the S&P organizing committee we picked the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco, staying in the comforts of the Bay Area, for our new home in 2012 and 2013.