Computer security as a discipline was first studied in the early 1970s, although the issues had influenced the development of many earlier systems such as the Atlas system and Multics. Unfortunately, many of the early seminal papers are often overlooked as developers (and sometimes researchers) rediscover problems and solutions, leading to wasted time and development effort.

We are identifying seminal papers in the field of computer security, synopsizing them, and putting them on a series of CD-ROMs. Each CD-ROM will also contain synopses of each paper on it and a key word index to aid the reader in locating papers quickly. The papers will be in their original text processing form (if available) and Postscript and PDF.

This information has several types of value. First, it provides a historical record of how computer security developed, and why. It provides a resource for computer security education. Instructors will be able to assign sets of papers for students to analyze without having to assemble the resource materials. Lastly, it provides a resource for practitioners, to which they can turn to see what has been suggested (and tried) before, under what conditions, and with what results.

We are beginning with seminal papers, technical reports, and other documents up to the early 1980's. Our first effort will include only those documents without copyright restrictions, because we wish to put out the first CD quickly (as proof that the idea of the project has merit). We plan to include between 10 and 30 papers. Later CDs will contain the contents of the first, plus substantially more papers.

These web pages contain information about the project. Please explore them!

Matt Bishop
Department of Computer Science
3059 Engineering Unit II
phone: +1 (530) 752-8060
fax: +1 (530) 752-4767
email: bishop@cs.ucdavis.edu