Vitally important aspects of our modern society have become dependent on rapid and secure communication, which is increasingly electronic. The new electronic age offers vast potential for new services and applications, but gives rise to serious new vulnerabilities and security threats. Moreover, many of the most important new applications come at the price of threats to privacy. The Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) will initiate a three-year "special focus" on Communication Security and Information Privacy that will explore the new vulnerabilities and threats and new methods for dealing with them. The activities planned for support under this special focus will include working groups, workshops, and tutorials on several themes, including Computer Security; Software Security; Large-scale Internet Attacks; Intellectual Property Protection; Security of Web Services and E-Commerce; Cryptography: Theory Meets Practice; Security Analysis of Protocols; Mobile and Wireless Security; On-line Privacy: Threats and Tools; Privacy/Confidentiality of Health Care Data; Intrusion Detection and Network Security Management Systems; Security and Trust Issues Associated with Ad-Hoc Computing/Pervasive Networking; Secure, Efficient Extraction of Joint Information from Multiple Datasets; Database Security: Query Authorization and Information Inference; Electronic Voting -- Theory and Practice; and Mobile Code Security.
