CCS

We are pleased to present herein the proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2014), held in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, November 3-7, 2014.

We received 585 submissions (not including some initial withdrawals) from 43 countries. This is the largest number of submissions received to date by a computer security conference. A Program Committee comprising 98 experts from 15 countries, helped by 399 external reviewers, evaluated these submissions employing the customary double-blind review procedure. The review process resulted in 114 papers being accepted to the program, representing an acceptance rate of about 19.5% and providing a very broad coverage of the entire information security area.

The review process was organized in three phases. After a first review phase, the authors of each paper were sent at least two preliminary reviews (the majority of papers, in fact, got three reviews). Authors were given an opportunity to respond to the comments received. During the second phase, reviews were updated as necessary, and in some cases additional reviews were solicited. At the end of the second phase, 542 papers received at least three reviews, 36 received four, and 5 received five. The first and third phases included comprehensive discussions, and after an intensive final debate, the acceptance decisions were made.

As is typically the case with very competitive conferences, many of the papers that could not be included in the program contain interesting ideas and often present new research results worth reporting on to the security community. For these reasons, we encouraged authors of some papers to consider submitting their work to the specialized workshops associated with CCS. Other high quality works that could not be accepted, will surely appear in other leading forums after suitable improvements. We hope that most authors benefitted from the feedback received from the CCS reviewers, and that the review process has helped them improve their papers (while we are also aware that due to the short reviewing time, at a conference of CCS scale it is unavoidable that a handful of reviews may be possibly lacking in some respect).