Hard Topic Theme: Trustworthy Systems

Background

Since 2013, ACSAC has had a hard topic theme that focuses the conference on tackling a hard, cutting-edge, cybersecurity problem requiring cooperation from government, industry, and academia. This year, ACSAC especially encourages contributions in the area of Trustworthy Systems.

ACSAC welcomes contributions on the Trustworthy Systems topic of not only technical papers, but also of panels, workshops, posters, and works-in-progress, as well as other "out-of-the-box" ideas. ACSAC also welcomes specific suggestions for invited speakers and presenters on this topic. Reference the Call for Submissions for specific instructions for each submission type.

During the conference, a number of orchestrated sessions will include government and industry speakers to frame the hard topic theme, industry and academic speakers to discuss issues and challenges related to the topic, and academic speakers to introduce promising security research. The primary goal of these special sessions will be to foster discussion that can expose opportunities for further collaboration and highlight promising research directions.

Hard Topic Description

This year's hard topic theme solicits research results and technologies that are considering the concept of trustworthy systems. Trustworthy systems generally involve the development of capabilities that offer security, safety, and reliability guarantees. ACSAC has always solicited work on applied security; with this hard topic, we hope to put great emphasize on deployable trustworthy systems.

The trustworthy systems topic is expended and includes but is not limited to approaches applied at the intersection of operation systems, formal methods, and programming languages; approaches applied at the architecture level; trustworthy artificial intelligence with emphasize on explainability, correctness, and robustness to attacks; zero-trust solutions that assume no implicit trust, but continually assess risk; and trustworthy systems form a user's perspective. The trustworthy systems topic does not necessarily mean building a complete solution, but the work needs to identify key challenges, explain the deficiencies in state-of-the-art solutions, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches and (potential) impact to the real world.