Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Asian Computing Science Conference, ASIAN 2003, held in Mumbai, India in December 2003. The 16 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 53 submissions. Among the topics addressed are type theory for operating systems protection, self configurable servers, network services, predicate detection, hierarchical specification, proof theory, electronic auctions, secure mobile computing, programming casculi, access control, middleware, program logic, real-time systems, and probabilistic distributed systems.