1. Workshop Agenda:

SafeConfig workshop selects each year a new workshop theme to offer a unique opportunity to researchers form academic, industry as well as government agencies to come together, discuss these challenges, exchange experiences, and propose plans for promoting novel research in this area. This year the title of the workshop is 'Automated Decision Making for Active Cyber Defense'. The high growth of cyber connectivity significantly increases the potential and sophistication of cyber-attacks. The new capabilities based on active cyber defense (ACD) are required to offer automated, intelligently-driven, agile, and resilient cyber defense. Both accurate "sense-making" based security analytics of the system artifacts (e.g., traces, configurations, logs, incident reports, alarms and network traffic), and provably-effective "decision-making" based on robust reasoning are required to enable ACD for cyber security and resiliency. Cyber security requires automated and scalable analytics in order to normalize, model, integrate, and analyze large and complex data to make correct decisions on time about security measures against threats. The automated decision making goals is to determine and improve the security and resiliency of cyber systems and services. As the current technology moves toward ‘smart’ cyber-physical infrastructures as well as open networking platforms (e.g., software defined networking and virtual/cloud computing), the need for large-scale security analytics and automation for decision making significantly increases.

SafeConfig workshop is a one-day program that includes invited talks, technical presentations of peer-reviewed papers, poster/demo sessions, and joint panels on research collaboration. This installment of SafeConfig is being run in conjunction with ACM Conference on Computing and Communications Security (conference link http://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2015/), to be held on October 12-16, 2015 in Denver, Colorado. Automated security decision making for new emerging application domains, such as clouds and data centers, cyber-physical systems, software defined networking, and Internet of things are of particular interest to SafeConfig community.

Topics (but are not limited to):

- Analytics of attacks motive and attribution.
- Accountability and provenance.
- Attack prediction and attribution.
- Attack forensics and automated incident analysis.
- Big data analytics for cyber security
- Configuration testing, forensics, debugging and evaluation.
- Continuous monitoring and response.
- Cyber agility and moving target defense.
- Cyber resiliency.
- Cyber-physical systems security.
- Formal semantics of security policies.
- Formal security analytics.
- Bio-inspired security.
- Model composition and integration.
- Risk-aware and context-aware security.
- Software defined networking and cloud computing security.
- Security configuration verification and economics.
- Security hardening and optimization.
- Security games.
- Security metrics.
- Security policy management.
- Theory of defense-of-depth.


2: Submission Guidelines

Papers must present original work and must be written in English. We require that the authors use the ACM format for papers, using one of the ACM Proceeding Templates. We solicit two types of papers, regular papers and position papers. The length of the regular papers in the proceedings format should not exceed 6 pages for long papers, 3 pages for short papers, and 1 page for posters, excluding well-marked references and appendices. Committee members are not required to read the appendices, so papers must be intelligible without them. Papers are to be submitted electronically as a single PDF file through the workshop website. Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their papers will be presented at the workshop.

Manuscript Submission Link: http://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=20715


3. Important Dates
Abstract Registration Deadline: June 26, 2015
Manuscript Submission: July 2, 2015
Acceptance Notification: July 20, 2015
Camera Ready: July 31, 2015
Conference Date: October 12, 2015


4. Program chair(s)
Ehab Al-Shaer, UNC Charlotte, USA
Christopher Oehmen, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA
Mohammad Ashiqur Rahman, UNC Charlotte, USA (mrahman4@uncc.edu)


5. Technical Program Committee
http://www.cyberdna.uncc.edu/safeconfig/2015/committees.html


6. Contact Info:
safeconfig@gmail.com
mrahman4@uncc.edu