A call for papers has been issued in connection with the 2002 ACM Workshop on XML Security, to be held November 22, 2002 at the Johnson Center in George Mason University, Fairfax VA, USA. Chaired by Michiharu Kudo (IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory, Japan) and Phillip Hallam-Baker (Verisign, USA), the workshop will be hosted in conjunction with the Ninth ACM [Association for Computing Machinery] Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS-9). The XML Security workshop "seeks submissions from academia and industry covering novel research on theoretical and practical aspects of the security required for XML-based systems. The organizers also encourage submissions from standardization communities such as W3C and OASIS, particularly from the technical viewpoint." Proposals should be submitted to Michiharu Kudo by email by August 10, 2002. The workshop "will address security problems faced by users who try to develop XML-based applications, Web services, and security middleware for XML. It ranges from specific security features, such as digital signatures and element-wise encryption and access control of XML documents, to XML-based infrastructure, such as Web services and XML databases. Since many security features for XML have already been standardized, experimental evaluations of these standards is one of the important topics covered by this workshop."

Workshop background: "Today eBusiness plays a key role in the economy. Since many organizations are suffering from security problems such as computer viruses and security breaches, computer security has become a crucial concern for eBusiness. XML has already established itself in eBusiness applications, and the XML-compliant languages play an important role in almost all eBusiness application systems and middleware..."

Topics. "Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• XML digital signatures
• XML encryption
• XML access control
• XML-based key management
• XML-based messaging
• XML-based security assertions
• XML database security
• Security policy languages for XML
• Architecture of XML security
• Security for Web services
• Experimental studies of above topics