It is estimated that configuration errors at the system or network level enable 65% of the attacks that have been seen, many of which have serious consequences because often a misconfigured system permits attackers to access security-critical objects.
The objective of this workshop is to provide a venue for discussions to eliminate or drastically reduce misconfigurations. It falls on overworked system administrators or the home user to configure their systems, often resulting in seriously misconfigured systems. Research is needed to lead to tools that will drastically reduce the work required to configure systems so that they are not open to attack. The research will involve policy languages that permit users to characterize their security and privacy needs, techniques to reify policies to enforceable rules, and new techniques that support changes to a policy that reflect down to the appropriate changes to rule sets.
The workshop involves the participation of industry so that the academic participants will become familiar with policies and rule sets drawn from real enterprises and networks.
The workshop will produce a detailed report to be posted on the NSF web site
