Book excerpt: New technology is always evolving and companies must have appropriate security for their businesses to be able to keep up to date with the changes. With the rapid growth of the internet and the world wide web, data and applications security will always be a key topic in industry as well as in the public sector, and has implications for the whole of society. Data and Applications Security covers issues related to security and privacy of information in a wide range of applications, including: Electronic Commerce, XML and Web Security; Workflow Security and Role-based Access Control; Distributed Objects and Component Security; Inference Problem, Data Mining and Intrusion Detection; Language and SQL Security; Security Architectures and Frameworks; Federated and Distributed Systems Security; Encryption, Authentication and Security Policies. This book contains papers and panel discussions from the Fourteenth Annual Working Conference on Database Security, which is part of the Database Security: Status and Prospects conference series sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). The conference was held in Schoorl, The Netherlands in August 2000.