The novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (also known as COVID-19), that emerged in late December 2019, has put the whole world in a complete shutdown by March 2020. The global economy is on the verge of unprecedented collapse, and the world population is staying at home. While it is crushing the healthcare systems, it has also revealed how unprepared and vulnerable cyberspace is in the face of a pandemic. Organizations around the world are watching their threat surface multiply as employees are operating outside the direct supervision of their specialized IT infrastructure. Account takeovers and data-scraping attacks on e-commerce websites have increased with the surge of the pandemic. Emails are being hit by phishing scams and malware schemes which are promising economic stimulus checks. Social networks are flooded with fake information and stalkers are taking advantage of fake pandemic tracking mobile apps. Sadly, it seems like the privacy debate is finally over as the government needs to deploy large surveillance operations to track people in order to contain the pandemic. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art privacy-preserving methods are not capable of handling such scenarios. Once COVID-19 is over, a paradigm shift in the areas of security, privacy, and trust is highly desirable in order to make cyberspace ready for the next catastrophic emergency event.
Against this backdrop, the goal of EmergencyComm 2020 is to bring together researchers and practitioners to share their ideas and findings in order to adapt state-of-the-art security, privacy, and trust practices to address emergency events. Therefore, this workshop invites papers in the areas of:
• Emergency security, privacy, and trust in Social and e-health networks
• Emergency safety, security, and privacy for smart city applications
• Protecting e-health data from Ransomware
• Emergency monitoring of e-health
• On the fly and robust validation of emergency requests
• Ethics and legal considerations in location tracking and social media disinformation
• Distributed trust and reputation establishment in decentralized environments
• Blockchain technologies to establish information transparency and traceability in social and health networks
• Fast and trusted Interoperable blockchains for e-health care and IT systems
• Privacy-preserving data mining and machine learning for emergency events
• Security, privacy, and trust in Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled emergency response
• Emergency event fraudulent app detection
The workshop is also interested in prototype demonstrations of novel solutions in the scope of emergency events.