IPICS stands for Intensive Programme on Information and Communication Systems Security. Originally, it started as an ERASMUS Intensive Programme activity. IPICS has been held, in several places around Europe (1998: Vienna, 1999: Chios, 2000: Stockholm, 2001: Samos, 2002: Samos, 2003: Malaga, 2004: Graz, 2005: Chios, 2006: Leuven, 2007: Glamorgan, 2008: Regensburg, 2009: Vienna, 2010: Samos, 2011: Corfu). For almost a decade IPICS has also been held as a winter school at the University of Oulu, Finland. This summer IPICS will take place at the Vienna Universtiy of Technology, Austria.

Over the past decade, the topic “IT security” has worked its way from an add-on gadget and nice-to-have or nice-to-know-about, to an essential feature of the IT systems which our society relies upon. The strongly increasing dependability of our society on a working IT infrastructure emphasizes existing vulnerabilities and threats. Despite this fact, the average user’s knowledge of IT security is lagging behind the evolution of the threat potential. Within this summer school we address this problem in an intensive manner. During the past 13 years, IPICS was well established in the academic community as the “academic European school on IT security”. This is mainly due to the experience gained through several years of cross-disciplinary discussions between experts from fields as different as, for example, “managerial aspects”, “cryptography”, “microchip design”, “embedded systems”, and “cyber crime”.