It’s always risky to pick out a few papers and say “I really like these,” because such an act tends to alienate and discourage authors of those that did not get chosen. So I have to say up front that I like all the papers we chose for this year’s conference. In fact, if I didn’t like them then they would not be in the conference.

But as we read through the submissions there were a few papers that really stood out. These are papers that really make me want to go see the presentations.

A collection of scientists from the Netherlands will be speaking on a hardware platform for the security and privacy administration of RFID tags. RFID is quickly permeating the marketplace. These tiny things are showing up everywhere, including US Passports. They’re ubiquitous and generally promiscuous, which in my mind is not a good combination. Some very clever people have come up with a way to provide security and privacy for RFID tags. The idea is timely, the execution is great, and the presentation is fantastic. The only concern we had with this paper was the appropriateness for LISA. But in this case the importance of the subject and the excellent research trumped concerns about the subject being a stretch for the audience. Their presentation will be in the Security session, conference Wednesday at 4 pm.

Dan Klein was looking through his MRTG graphs one day and discovered that his system was being hijacked by spammers. He immediately went in to an investigative mode and began collecting as much data as he could. The result is an amazingly thorough forensic analysis of this particular kind of spammer attack. His presentation is in the Electronic Mail session on conference Wednesday at 11 am.

People who don’t pay much attention to networking may not even know what a network flow is, but anyone who has ever tried to troubleshoot a network problem will certainly understand the concept. Rather than looking at a file full of packets sorted by time, one can collect up and examine packets by connection, or flow. Using flows can greatly simplify lots of tedious tasks in network adinistration and troubleshooting. The problem is, every manufacturer has a different way of storing and examining flows. Well someone from CERT (Brian Trammel) and from CA Labs (Carrie Gates) have come up with a suite of tools that lets you examine and manipulate flows. The result is great! The NetSA Aggregated Flow Suite does for network flows what ImageMagick does for digital images. Their presentation is in the Visualization session on conference Thursday at 4 pm.

Large installations have large problems, especially when part of the infrastructure fails and other parts have to be changed to take up the slack. Most installations use either manual or ad hoc mechanisms to detect these changes and take corrective actions. The state of the art in this area is policy-based management systems, but even these don’t always scale well to large installations. Interdependencies of components can cause a flood of changes caused b a series of reactions to a single stimulus. Some scientists from UIUC and from HP think that part of the problem is the way in which policies are specified. Their paper does an excellent job of presenting the current widely accepted mechanism for policy specification, called Event-Condition-Action (ECA), and proposing an enhancement to it which will scale better in larger installations. This is an excellent presentation of sound theoretical work with immediate practical application. Their presentation is in the Theory session on conference Thursday at 9 am.

There are many more excellent papers that you may find interesting. I wish I had time to write about each and every one. Look through the conference schedule and see what papers sound promising. When you arrive at the conference, get your copy of the Proceedings right away, then read through those paper that interest you. If you like what you read, go to the paper’s presentation, hear what the author has to say, and you will even have a chance to ask questions, either as part of the audience or one-on-one when the session is over.

I hope you enjoy this year’s papers as much as I do.