Call for Papers

The Computer Security Foundations Symposium is an annual conference for researchers in computer security. CSF seeks papers on foundational aspects of computer security, such as formal security models, relationships between security properties and defenses, principled techniques and tools for design and analysis of security mechanisms, as well as their application to practice. While CSF welcomes submissions beyond the topics listed below, the main focus of CSF is foundational security: submissions that lack foundational aspects risk rejection.

Topics

New results in computer security are welcome. We also encourage challenge/vision papers, which may describe open questions and raise fundamental concerns about security. Possible topics for all papers include, but are not limited to:

• access control
• accountability
• anonymity and privacy
• authentication
• blockchain
• computer-aided cryptography
• data and system integrity
• database security
• decidability and complexity
• distributed systems security
• electronic voting
• formal methods and verification
• decision theory
• hardware-based security
• information flow control
• intrusion detection
• language-based security
• machine learning
• network security
• data provenance
• mobile security
• security metrics
• security protocols
• smart contract
• software security
• socio-technical security
• trust management
• usable security
• web security

SoK papers: Systematization of Knowledge Papers

CSF'19 solicits systematization of knowledge (SoK) papers in foundational computer security and privacy research. These papers systematize, re-formulate, or evaluate existing work in one established and significant research topic. Such papers must provide new insights. Survey papers without new insights are not appropriate. Submissions will be distinguished by the prefix “SoK:” in the title and a checkbox on the submission form. Accepted papers will be presented at the symposium and included in the proceedings.

Special Sessions

This year, we strongly encourage papers in three foundational areas of research we would like to promote at CSF:

• MACHINE LEARNING MEETS SECURITY AND PRIVACY (Chair: Matt Fredrikson). Machine learning has revolutionized computer science. However, machine learning algorithms are often applied in ways that offer few guarantees in terms of fairness and transparency of the results or privacy of the dataset. We invite submissions on foundational work in this area. Topics include identifying security, privacy, and fairness issues in machine learning algorithms; new reasoning techniques necessary to justify the security and privacy properties of machine learning algorithms; techniques for ensuring security, fairness, and transparency of machine learning algorithms; and techniques for protecting the privacy of training data and models.


• BLOCKCHAIN and SMART CONTRACTS (Chair: Aniket Kate). The rapid development of blockchain technology and smart contracts has led us to several non-traditional security and privacy challenges, as evidenced by a number of high-profile attacks that resulted in huge financial losses. There is a strong need to develop formal foundations for the security and privacy of blockchain and smart contracts. We invite submissions on foundational work in these areas. Topics include identifying security and privacy issues; analysis and verification of existing solutions; design of new systems with better security and privacy properties; broader foundational issues such as how blockchain mechanisms interoperate and fit into larger distributed ecosystems and foundational security aspects of applications built on top of blockchain mechanisms; and new programming languages for smart contracts.


• COMPUTER-AIDED CRYPTOGRAPHY (Chair: Dominique Unruh). Modern cryptography is built on firm theoretical foundations. However, cryptography proofs that do not abstract away from the actual cryptography are often intricate and the gap from model to code is usually large, which opens the door to bugs and vulnerabilities. Computer-aided formal methods can provide assurance of the security of cryptographic protocols, primitives and their implementations in software and hardware. We invite submissions on foundational work in this area. Topics include, but are not limited to, verification of cryptographic protocols and primitives, verification of cryptographic software and hardware, tools to automate formal verification, models and proof techniques that are more verification-friendly, and formal proofs of side-channel countermeasures.

These papers will be reviewed under the supervision of the special session chairs. They will be presented at the conference, and will appear in the CSF proceedings, without any distinction from the other papers.

Invited Speakers

Proceedings

Proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press and will be available at the symposium. Some small number of papers will be selected by the PC as "Distinguished Papers".

Important Dates AoE (UTC-12h)

Abstracts due:	February 22, 2019
Papers due:	February 26, 2019
Notification:	April 19, 2019
Camera ready:	May 10, 2019
CSF Symposium:	June 25-28, 2019

Program Committee

• Thomas H. Austin, San Jose State University
• Musard Balliu, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
• Bruno Blanchet, INRIA
• Tom Chothia, University of Birmingham
• Véronique Cortier, CNRS
• Cas Cremers, CISPA-Helmholtz Center
• Stephanie Delaune, Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA (Program Co-Chair)
• Riccardo Focardi, Ca'Foscari Univ. of Venice
• Cédric Fournet, MSR
• Matt Fredrikson, Carnegie Mellon University (Session Chair on Machine Learning)
• Marco Gaboardi, University at Buffalo, SUNY
• Limin Jia, Carnegie Mellon University (Program Co-Chair)
• Chris Hawblitzel, MSR
• Justin Hsu, University of Wisconsin
• Aniket Kate, Purdue University (Session Chair on Blockchain)
• Matteo Maffei, TU Wien
• David Naumann, Stevens Institute of Technology
• Catuscia Palamidessi, INRIA
• Corina Pasareanu, NASA Ames Research Center
• Christine Rizkallah, University of New South Wales
• Peter Y.A. Ryan, University of Luxembourg
• David Sands, Chalmers University of Technology
• Ralf Sasse, ETH Zurich
• Dominique Unruh, University of Tartu (Session Chair on Cryptography)
• Danfeng Zhang, Penn State University

Paper Submission Instructions

Submitted papers must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with published proceedings.

Papers must be submitted using the two-column IEEE Proceedings style available for various document preparation systems at the IEEE Conference Publishing Services page. All papers should be at most 12 pages long, not counting bibliography and well-marked appendices. Committee members are not required to read appendices, and so the paper must be intelligible without them.

CSF'19 will employ a light form of double-blind reviewing. Submitted papers must (a) omit any reference to the authors' names or the names of their institutions, and (b) reference the authors' own related work in the third person (e.g., not "We build on our previous work ..." but rather "We build on the work of ..."). Nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing the paper more difficult (e.g., important background references should not be omitted or anonymized). Please see the conference site for answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ) that address many common concerns. When in doubt, contact the program chairs.

Papers failing to adhere to any of the instructions above will be rejected without consideration of their merits.

Papers intended for one of the special sessions should select the "Computer-Aided Cryptography", "Blockchain and smart contract", "Machine learning meets security and privacy" option, as appropriate.

At least one co-author of each accepted paper is required to attend CSF to present the paper. In the event of difficulty in obtaining visas for travel, exceptions can be made and will be discussed on a case-by-case basis.

Submission website can be found HERE.

Program Chairs

General Chair

Financial Chair

Publications Chair

Publicity Chair

---

Call For Papers (txt)