Preface to the special issue of selected papers from FCS/VERIFY 2002

Computer security is of fast-growing importance as computer systems more and more affect various aspects of everyday life. Examples are the automation of air-traffic control, computer-assisted business processes, electronic commerce, and multi-functional chipcards as well as databases for storing personal data such as customer profiles, health records, or social security entries. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in logic-based foundations for computer security and in formal analysis methods. This includes the formal verification of cryptographic protocols, the investigation of enforcement mechanisms such as access controls, the modeling of mobile code and network security as well as the formal security analysis of information flow and its application in the specification of security requirements and in the detection of covert channels. The common aim is to achieve a higher confidence in that the developed systems operate correctly and in a secure manner. Since formal approaches to developing safety or security critical systems create numerous deduction problems, automated theorem proving techniques and tools are needed for reducing the verification burden in such formal developments, thus making them feasible. The idea for this volume originated during the stimulating presentations at the Workshop on Foundations of Computer Security 1 (FCS) and the Verification Workshop 2 (VERIFY), which were held jointly in July 2002 at the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC) in Copenhagen, Denmark. The workshops were devoted to bringing together the formal methods, the deduction, and the computer security communities with the objective to further encourage interactions across the borders of these disciplines. The program consisted of 17 presentations of regular contributions and two invited talks, one by Dieter Gollmann about Defining security is difficult and error prone and one by Fabio Massacci about the Formal verification of SET by Visa and Mastercard: Lessons for formal methods in security. Authors of selected articles having a clear focus on Computer Security were invited to submit an extended and improved journal version of their contribution. The six articles in this special issue have all undergone the standard peer-reviewing process. We are grateful to the editors in chief of this journal, Dieter Gollmann, Javier Lopez, Catherine Meadows, and Eiji Okamoto for inviting us as guest editors of this special issue. Numerous other colleagues have helped us tremendously in preparing this issue by dedicating their time and energy to peer-reviewing. We are very thankful for their judgment and suggestions. Last but not least, we thank all authors for submitting to this special issue.