IEEE Security and Privacy Symposium in the Year 2003

Abstract

In noting the 20th anniversary of the establishment of IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, we give a retrospective view of the research papers from the Security and Privacy Symposium in 2003. These papers represent the context of security concerns and solutions of that era. In some cases they illustrate problems that were solved; in other cases they foreshadow the dominant themes of today.S tepping back 20 years, we find ourselves in a primitive world. There are no cryptocurrencies, few websites use Java, cellphones don't run apps, there is no Internet of Things because there are no "Things," the dot-com bubble is a recent and painful cautionary tale, Windows 2000 is ubiquitous, elliptic curve techniques for cryptography are new and barely understood, and quantum computing is science fiction. Where were security and privacy in this era that was on the cusp of massive improvements in processing power and communications? The Security and Privacy Symposium that year published 19 papers that showed foresight and practical relevance in varying degrees.Two papers on denial of service provided important mitigation approaches for a relatively new research area. Both papers provided new techniques. In "Defending Against Denial-of-Service Attacks With Puzzle Auctions," Wang and Reiter 1 proposed the use of client puzzles with the addition of auctions and demonstrated this in Linux. This work is notable because, while puzzle solving never played a role in combatting distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS), it is very relevant to proof-of-work blockchains: it is necessary to solve a puzzle to add a block to the chain or to mine for cryptocurrency. The paper by Wang and Reiter describes adaptive puzzles, which are precisely what blockchains