ARES Conference: Welcome Message from the ARES Conference Officers

The Seventh International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2012) brings together researchers and practitioners in the field of dependability. ARES 2012 highlights the various aspects of dependability, following the tradition of previous ARES conferences, again with a special focus on the crucial linkage between availability, reliability and security. ARES aims at contributing to an intensive discussion of research issues in the field of dependability as an integrative concept that in its core comprises research contributions from availability, safety, confidentiality, integrity, maintainability and security and their different areas of application. This year´s conference emphasizes the interplay between foundations and practical issues of research in information security and will also look at upcoming research challenges. ARES 2012 is dedicated to expanding collaborations between different sub??disciplines and to strengthening the community for further research which, previous ARES conferences have started to build. We are very happy to welcome two well??known keynote speakers: Annie I. Ant??n and Chenxi Wang. From many submissions we have selected the 15 best for a presentation as full paper. The quality of submissions has steadily improved over the last years and the conference officers sometimes faced a difficult decision when selecting which papers should be accepted. This year??s acceptance rate is 15% for full papers. In addition, several workshops and short papers show ongoing research projects and offer interesting starting points for discussions.