Information and Communication Security: Second International Conference, Icics'99 Sydney, Australia,

ICICS'99, the Second International Conference on Information and C- munication Security, was held in Sydney, Australia, 9-11 November 1999. The conference was sponsored by the Distributed System and Network Security - search Unit, University of Western Sydney, Nepean, the Australian Computer Society, IEEE Computer Chapter (NSW), and Harvey World Travel. I am g- teful to all these organizations for their support of the conference. The conference brought together researchers, designers, implementors and users of information security systems and technologies. A range of aspects was addressed from security theory and modeling to system and protocol designs and implementations to applications and management. The conference con- sted of a series of refereed technical papers and invited technical presentations. The program committee invited two distinguished key note speakers. The ?rst keynote speech by Doug McGowan, a Senior Manager from Hewlett-Packard, USA, discussed cryptography in an international setting. Doug described the current status of international cryptography and explored possible future trends and new technologies. The second keynote speech was delivered by Sushil Ja- dia of George Mason University, USA. Sushil's talk addressed the protection of critical information systems. He discussed issues and methods for survivability of systems under malicious attacks and proposed a fault-tolerance based - proach. The conference also hosted a panel on the currently much debated topic of Internet censorship. The panel addressed the issue of censorship from various viewpoints namely legal, industrial, governmental and technical.