While today much security research is about defending against the attack du jour, there has been theoretical work in computer security and there are the beginnings of a science base for security. This talk will discuss the kinds of questions one might expect a scince base to address.

It will also give examples of how such questions could be answered. Basic concepts in security, such as attack, policy, and enforcement turn out to be surprisingly subtle to define.

FRED B. SCHNEIDER is Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science at Cornell and also serves as the Chief Scientist for the NSF-funded TRUST Science and Technology Center, which brings together researchers at U.C. Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Cornell, Stanford, and Vanderbilt. He is a a fellow of AAAS, ACM, and IEEE, was awarded a Doctor of Science honoris causa by the University of NewCastle-upon-Tyne, and received the 2012 IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award for "contributions to trustworthy computing through novel approaches to security, fault-tolerance and formal methods for concurrent and distributed systems". The U.S. National Academy of Engineering elected Schneider to membership in 2011, and the Norges Tekniske Vitenskapsakademi (Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences) named him a foreign member in 2010.