2nd International Workshop on Self-Protecting Systems (SPS'20)

Call for Paper

Effectively protecting computer systems from cyber-attacks is a challenging task due to their large scale and the heterogeneity of the underlying hardware and software components. Furthermore, when trying to defend from an attack, the time factor is critical and any non-guided human resolution attempt could introduce a significant stress and delay to the execution of the proper response. This situation provides the attackers more time to accomplish their objectives.

Several organizations, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), have released guidelines and best practices to manage cyber-security related risk (e.g., the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 1.1). However, despite a growing interest in the area in the last 5 years, automation of cyber-security operations is still at its early stages.

Automatically defending a computer system encompasses a large number of activities, that range from data capture, management and analysis, to automated decision making and automated system operations.

In this workshop, we solicit high quality contributions that fit with the overarching idea of creating a fully automated protection system. The aim of the workshop is to share new findings, exchange ideas and discuss research challenges on the following topics (not an exhaustive list):

• Distributed System Monitoring

• Secure Monitoring

• Feature Selection

• Automatic Data Correlation (Batch/Streaming)

• Intrusion Detection

• Anomaly Detection

• Threats Detection

• Cyber-Deception: approaches, analysis, honeypots, metrics, moving target defense

• Software engineering for self-protecting systems: System architectures, services, components and platforms, Goal specification and policies

• Risk Management

• Intrusion Response

• Attack Modeling

• Defense Modeling

• Implementation of prototypes that integrate cutting edge technologies, e.g., Software Defined Networks, Container-Based systems, applications based on micro-services

• Non-Stationary Systems Modeling

• Behavioural Modeling

• Cooperative/Competitive Multi-agents modeling

Furthermore, we solicit submissions that examine the self-protection problem from an holistic perspective, that is, that will consider the overall picture and propose novel software architectures, frameworks and technologies to ease the realization of self-protecting systems.