IFIP TC-11 WG 11.1 & WG 11.8 Joint Workshop on Security Culture
(as part of Sec2007)

14-16 May 2007
Sandton, south Africa

Paper submission deadline - 11 Nov, 2006

Conference Web Site

IFIP TC-11 WG 11.1 & WG 11.8 Joint Workshop

as part of SEC 2007

Fostering knowledge and skills for manageable information security

With information security having become an essential element of organisational IT infrastructures, it is important to recognise that the related responsibilities should not be entrusted lightly. However, the IT security industry encompasses individuals with varying degrees of skill, competency, and knowledge, and there is a need to enable discrimination between those who have merely a casual familiarity with the topic and those that are truly qualified practitioners.  As a result, a variety of industry bodies and product vendors have instigated professional certification schemes (ranging from the highly specific and technical, to those that are more general and broadly based), and an increasing range of academic qualifications have also emerged that target this domain.

Given that such options are available, it is logical to suggest that organisations should aim to have appropriately skilled and qualified staff.  However, the range and number of options that exist in the marketplace can cause confusion – with the consequence that even those who recognise the need for qualified staff may not specifically know what they need to look for.  Furthermore, knowing which staff need to be qualified or certified, and to what level, can represent a challenge.

This workshop will consider the issues of professional certification and qualification from a security management perspective, with the aim of providing clarity and guidance to organisations that may otherwise be facing difficult decisions.  Topics of interest include, but are not limited to;

• The need for qualified security professionals
• Certification requirements for specific roles and sectors
• The relationship between industry certifications and academic qualifications
• Fostering appropriate understanding amongst employers
• In-house specialists versus external expertise
• Designing security curriculum
• Measuring effectiveness of security qualifications
• Characteristics of security certification schemes
• Comparative analyses of security certification schemes
• Role of security specialists in formulating and disseminating policies

Instructions for authors

 Authors are asked to submit full papers, not exceeding six pages, written in English and formatted in accordance with the instructions for the main SEC 2007 event. Submitted papers must be original, unpublished, and not submitted to another conference or journal for consideration of publication. Papers must be submitted in electronic form through the web. The web site for the electronic submission and author instructions can be accessed via http://www.sbs.co.za/ifipsec2007/

 Accepted papers will be presented during a special themed session within the SEC 2007 conference, and will be published in the proceedings of the event by the official IFIP publisher Springer Science and Business Media. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register with the workshop and present the paper.

Important dates

Submission of papers: November 1, 2006

Notification to authors: January 15, 2007

Camera-ready copies: February 5, 2007

For further information, contact the workshop chairs:

Prof. Steven Furnell, chair WG11.1 (steven.furnell@plymouth.ac.uk), or
Colonel Daniel Ragsdale, chair WG11.8 (daniel.ragsdale@usma.edu)