The Eighteenth International Workshop on Security Protocols will take place from Wednesday March 24th to Friday March 26th, 2010 at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, England.
As with previous years, attendance at the International Workshop on Security Protocols is by invitation only.
In order to be invited you must submit a position paper. You are therefore encouraged to consider submitting such a paper.
The theme of this year's workshop is "Virtually Perfect Security".
We do not often need security to really be complete. In practice, we would usually be content to enjoy the effect of perfect security relative to some particular abstraction, rather than be required to establish any metaphysical fact. But an important case arises when the abstraction in question is a virtual machine of some kind: virtual machines are (performance aside) easy to layer, whereas security protocols (notoriously) are not. Nowadays the virtual machine is often being run in order to realise some aspect of a virtual world.
To what extent are abstractions such as virtual machines useful, or even tolerable, when we are designing and deploying security protocols? How can a protocol ever be sure that it is running on the "right" virtual machine stack? And would such knowledge enable Moriarty to break out of the sandpit and seize control... but of what?
The theme itself is not intended to restrict the topic of your paper, but to help provide a particular perspective and to focus the discussions. Our intention is to stimulate discussion likely to lead to conceptual advances, or to promising new lines of investigation, rather than merely to consider finished work.
Short indicative submissions are preferred, preferably no more than 2000 words. You will have the opportunity to extend and revise your paper both before the pre-proceedings are issued, and again after the workshop. At the workshop, you will be expected to spend about ten minutes introducing the idea of your paper, in a way which facilitates a longer more general discussion.
Pre-proceedings will be provided at the workshop. The proceedings of previous workshops in this series have been published by Springer-Verlag as Lecture Notes in Computer Science (see LNCS 5087, 4631, 3957, 3364, 2845, 2467, 2133, 1796, 1550, 1361 and 1189). If you have not previously attended the Security Protocols Workshop, you may find it helpful to refer to these to get an idea of the flavour.
The exact cost of the workshop is to be determined, but is likely to be in the region of 300 GBP (which will include lunches and a formal dinner in Jesus College).
Jan 31st Submission deadline (or 29th if you prefer not to work weekends)
Feb 22nd Notification to authors
Mar 8th Revised papers due and deadline for registration
Mar 24th - 26th Workshop in Cambridge
To be considered for invitation, you must send a first draft of a position paper to James Malcolm (j.a.malcolm@herts.ac.uk) by the deadline noted above. If you wish, you may make an initial response to say that you are potentially interested. Feel free to circulate this invitation widely, but do remember that the workshop has a limited size and in order to be invited you must submit a position paper.
If you have any enquiries about the
workshop then you might want to look at the
rules, but if your question is not answered
there, please contact one of the organizing
committee:
* Chairman: Bruce Christianson (Email: B.Christianson AT
herts.ac.uk)
Professor of
Informatics, University of Hertfordshire
* Paper submission to: James A. Malcolm (Email: J.A.Malcolm AT herts.ac.uk, Tel: +44-1707-284310).