One perk of being on the committee is you get to read the papers before anyone else. The security papers this year are really exciting.
One being presented on Wednesday (previously I wrote Thursday; that was a typo) applies AI techniques to fixing firewall rulesets. Imagine if a firewall noticed a new set of ACLs made certain unit-tests fail. This system can actually modify the rules and, with pretty good likelihood, fix the problem. The solution might not be optimal, but it is good enough until a human can come in and fix the problem optimally. The abstract is online, and if you are a Usenix member, you can read the entire paper now. The entire paper will be readable by all after the conference. The paper is called "First Step Towards Automatic Correction of Firewall Policy Faults" by Fei Chen and Alex X. Liu, Michigan State University; JeeHyun Hwang and Tao Xie, North Carolina State University.
Maybe you think this kind of self-correcting firewall system is crazy. If you attend the conference, you can be there for the Q&A session and participate.
A list of all the papers and technical presentations are here: http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/tech/tech.html
Usenix LISA is in San Jose, CA from November 7-12, 2010. There are many discounts available, but the best one is to simply register by Monday, October 18.
See you there!
I think you also need to be attending LISA, not just a Usenix member to get to the entire paper at this time. I can get into the members only ;login: articles, but not the conference papers