Cloud computing has emerged as a core paradigm shift for providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. Industries and governments are strongly interested in using cloud approaches to simplify and consolidate their IT systems and services, where this may be either through commercial cloud offerings or via private cloud instances. Core concerns though exist and remain with respect to the levels of assured security and data privacy that are enforceable via cloud technologies, which has delayed overall adoption rates. Clearly, as it matures, homomorphic cryptography may directly address many of these issues over the long run, but in the near and mid term more pragmatically deployable solutions are innately required.

This workshop focuses on security and privacy assessment techniques, and attack and data loss mitigation strategies suitable for deployment on today's cloud platforms and those of the immediate future. Of particular interest are research works that seek to provide quantitive assurances of the levels of security and/or data privacy that they provide. Original works addressing state-of-the-art issues in security and privacy in cloud computing environments are solicited in (but not limited to) the following areas:

• Assessment of privacy assurances within clouds
• Methods to assess private/proprietary data leakage within clouds
  
• Mitigation strategies for information leakage within clouds
  
• Assessment of assured levels of security within clouds
  
• Cloud-enabled moving target defense approaches
  
• Novel cyber-attacks against cloud instances/platforms
  
• Evaluations of commercial/open source cloud platform security/privacy

Accepted papers will be published by the Conference Publishing Services (CPS) and archived in the Digital Library.

Extended version of selected papers presented at SPICE-2012 will be considered for publication in special issues of several international journals.