The Internet Society is excited to announce that four workshops will be held in conjunction with the upcoming Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium on 18 February 2018 in San Diego, CA. The workshop topics this year are:
- Binary Analysis Research,
- Decentralized IoT Security and Standards,
- DNS Privacy, and
- Usable Security.
A quick overview of each of the workshops is provided below. Submissions are currently being accepted for emerging research in each of these areas. Watch for the final program details in early January!
The first workshop is a new one this year on Binary Analysis Research (BAR). It is exploring the reinvigorated field of binary code analysis in light of the proliferation of interconnected embedded devices. In recent years there has been a rush to develop binary analysis frameworks. This has occurred in a mostly uncoordinated manner with researchers meeting on an ad-hoc basis or working in obscurity and isolation. As a result, there is little sharing or results and solution reuse among tools. The importance of formalized and properly vetted methods and tools for binary code analysis in order to deal with the scale of growth in these interconnected embedded devices cannot be overstated. The BAR workshop aims to provide an interaction point for researchers doing work in binary program analysis, with half of the workshop dedicated to traditional paper sessions and the other half to a roundtable discussion among researchers, implementers, and end-users of binary analysis techniques.
The second workshop is also new this year and focuses on Decentralized IoT Security and Standards (DISS). The success of the Internet of Things (IoT) depends significantly on solving the underlying security and privacy challenges. Due to their scale of deployment and limited resources, some of these systems will be extremely challenging to secure. A decentralized approach to IoT security brings forth many opportunities but also challenges, such as operating with constrained device and network capabilities, state synchronization, and trust management. At the same time, many IoT standards are now under development and decisions are being made today that will have long-term impact on the security of these systems. Of particular interest are open standards (e.g., IETF CoAP, OCF, and LWM2M), developed by organizations such as the IETF and the W3C including W3C Web of Things. The DISS workshop will gather researches and the open standards community together to help address the challenges of IoT Security.
The third workshop, DNS Privacy: Increasing Usability and Decreasing Traceability (DNSPRIV), continues the work started at the first DNS Privacy workshop held at NDSS 2017. DNS Privacy has been a growing concern of the IETF and others in the Internet engineering community for the last few years. Almost every activity on the Internet starts with a DNS query (and often several). Those queries can reveal information about not only what websites are visited but also about other services such as the domains of email contacts or chat services. This information crosses international boundaries and is sent in the clear. The IETF has taken steps to address these concerns; however, because of the diversity of the DNS ecosystem, and the pervasive role of DNS and domain names in Internet applications and security, much is not fully understood or resolved. The goal of this workshop is to bring together privacy and Internet researchers with a diversity of backgrounds and views, to identify promising long-term mitigations of the broad space of DNS privacy risks.
The final workshop, Usable Security (USEC), is a regular at NDSS dating back several years. It has even resulted in a sister event held in Europe over the summer months. This workshop brings together the technical and human aspects in of real-world technology to provide improved security and privacy. Experience has taught us over and over again that the best technical solutions for security and privacy will fail in deployment if usability is not a key design consideration. Enabling people to manage privacy and security necessitates giving due consideration to the users and the larger operating context within which technology is embedded. USEC 2018 aims to bring together researchers already engaged in this interdisciplinary effort with other computer science researchers in areas such as visualization, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and theoretical computer science as well as researchers from other domains such as economics and psychology.
I hope you will join us at NDSS 2018 from 18-21 February. Registration for the event will open later this month. Visit the NDSS website for more information, including upcoming announcements on the full workshop and NDSS program agendas. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn using #NDSS18.