Journal of Computer Security

The 21st ACM Symposium on Applied Computing was held 23–27 April, 2006 in Dijon, France. Its Security Track hosted 9 papers in diverse areas of information security. The Track was organised in the same fashion as a full research conference, involving the reviews of 19 eminent representatives of both Industry and Academia forming its program committee. Their work resulted in each of the 47 submitted papers receiving at least 3 reviews. Only 9 were selected for presentation at the conference. Among these, a further selection identified 6 papers for journal submission. Each selected paper was upgraded by the authors so as to ensure at least 30% new material with respect to the conference version. Then, every upgraded paper was additionally reviewed by at least 2 leading experts in computer security, and only 4 best papers were selected for inclusion in this special number of the Journal of Computer Security. The resulting set of papers can thus be thought of as triple distilled! The contents of this number pertain to various aspects of Computer Security. In alphabetical order, the first paper by Belsis et al. is about anti-spamming, introducing a clever machine-learning approach to email classification, which is shown to be both effective and efficient. The second paper by Grothoff et al. lies in the area of steganography, exploiting the redundancy of natural language to hide information in translated text. Then comes a paper by Vigna et al., which advances a serial composition of three different security measures to tuning anomaly detection in the context of web-based applications. The last paper is authored by Xu and Chapin, and is about address-space layout randomization by means of an innovative technique called Island Code Transformation. As editors of this journal number, we are confident that, in delivering material of high quality, these papers provide an interesting and representative snapshot of Computer Security at present and of its research directions for the near future.