I’m on the program committee for the 3rd International Workshop on Secure Systems Methodologies Using Patterns (SPattern’09) and I’ve just submitted my reviews of submitted papers (2 days late, sorry!)

I first got involved in this several years ago, as a member of the Open Group Security Forum. Back then, using design patterns to address security problems was quite a new idea, and we spent a long time in the group (I think about 2 years!) coming up with a few basic Security Design Patterns, finally published in 2004.

Since then, there have been several books published on security patterns, and security is now an accepted domain of interest in the patterns community. The recent Symbian Press book, Common Design Patterns for Symbian OS, includes 4 patterns in the Security category, including one (Secure Agent) authored by yours truly 🙂

I believe etiquette dictates that I shouldn’t discuss the papers I reviewed, as they may or may not make it on to the final workshop programme, but if you are interested in taking advantage of the collected security expertise embodied in security patterns please make a note in your diary of the workshop dates: 31 Aug to 04 Sep 2009 in Linz, Austria.

I’ll update this post when the final workshop programme is published.