The 16th IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec) is a
forum that brings together researchers and practitioners from academia,
government, and industry to address the needs of the cyber security community
through new and insightful visualization and analysis techniques. VizSec
provides an excellent venue for fostering greater exchange and new
collaborations on a broad range of security- and privacy-related topics.
VizSec will be held in Vancouver, Canada in conjunction with IEEE VIS, on
Wednesday, October 23rd 2019.

This year, VizSec will be more closely integrated with the IEEE VIS program.
VizSec will take place during the main week of the conference, giving VizSec
authors and attendees enhanced access to IEEE VIS, the premier forum for
advances in theory, methods, and applications of visualization and visual
analytics.

The purpose of VizSec is to explore effective and scalable visual interfaces
for security domains such as network security, computer forensics, reverse
engineering, insider threat detection, cryptography, privacy, user assisted
attacks prevention, compliance management, wireless security, secure coding,
and penetration testing.

Technical Papers
----------------

Full papers describing novel contributions in security visualization are
solicited. Papers may present techniques, applications, theory, analysis,
experiments, or evaluations. We encourage the submission of papers on
technologies and methods that promise to improve cyber security practices,
including, but not limited to:
- Situation awareness and/or understanding.
- Incident handling including triage, exploration, correlation, and response.
- Computer forensics.
- Machine learning and explainable AI for cybersecurity.
- Visual analytics for cybersecurity.
- Data protection & privacy.
- Blockchain performance & security.
- Cybersecurity in critical infrastructure.
- Recording and reporting results of investigations.
- Assisting proactive security configuration and deployment.
- Reverse engineering and malware analysis.
- Vulnerability management.
- Multiple data source analysis.
- Analyzing information requirements for computer network defense.
- Evaluation and/or user testing of VizSec systems.
- Criteria for assessing the effectiveness of cyber security visualizations
(whether from a security goal perspective or a human factors perspective).
- Modeling system and network behavior.
- Modeling attacker and defender behavior.
- Studying risk and impact of cyber attacks.
- Predicting future attacks or targets.
- Security metrics.
- Software security.
- Mobile application security.
- Social networking privacy and security.
- Training & education.

When applicable, visualization and interaction techniques that effectively
capture the insights of human analysts and/or allow analysts to collaborate
efficiently are particularly desirable.

Submissions including tests and evaluations of the proposed tools and
techniques are also considered particularly desirable. If possible, making the
data used for the tests available will also be considered positively. If you
do not have real-world data to demonstrate your visualization, you may be
interested in looking at the VAST Challenge data sets.

Short Papers
------------

Short papers describing initial research results, concise research
contributions or incremental work on the above topics, even including
practical applications of security visualization, are solicited. We encourage
the submission of papers discussing the introduction of cyber security
visualizations into operational context, including, but not limited to:
- Cases where visualization made positive contributions towards meeting
operational needs.
- Gaps or negative outcomes from visualization deployments.
- Situations where visualization was not utilized, but could have had a
positive impact.
- Lessons learned from operational engagements.
- Insights gained from the transition process.

Cyber security practitioners from industry, as well as the research
community, are encouraged to submit case studies.

Posters
-------
Poster submissions may showcase late-breaking results, work in progress,
preliminary results, or visual representations relevant to the VizSec
community. The poster program will be a great opportunity for the authors to
interact with the attendees, potentially also through live demos, and solicit
feedback. Accepted poster abstracts will be made available on this website.

Awards
------

There will be an award for the best paper from the accepted program. This
award will be given to the paper judged to have the highest overall quality as
determined by the program committee. Key elements of the selection process
include whether papers include evaluation, repeatable results, and open-source
data or software. Authors of the best paper will be invited for submission to
Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Both full and short
papers are eligible.

There will also be an award for Best Presentation and an award for Best
Poster. Each award comes with a $50 USD Amazon gift card thanks to our sponsor,
Two Six Labs. These awards will recognize authors’ efforts to clearly and
concisely present their work to the audience. The awards will be determined by
anonymous judges and given to recipients at the end of the conference.

Submissions
-----------

The VizSec 2019 Proceedings will be published by IEEE. Submissions must be
formatted using the IEEE VGTC conference proceedings template that can be
found at: http://junctionpublishing.org/vgtc/Track/vis.html.

VizSec full papers are limited to 9 pages of content plus an additional 2
pages of references. Papers may be shorter than this but must make a similar
contribution to a longer paper. Reviewers are not required to read the
appendices or any pages past the maximum. Short papers should be at most 4
pages plus 1 page of references. Posters should be 2 page abstracts.
Submissions not meeting these guidelines will be rejected without
consideration of their merit. Reviews are single-blind, so authors may include
names and affiliations in their submissions. Submitted papers must not
substantially overlap papers that have been published or that are
simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings.
Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their papers will be presented
at the conference.

VizSec uses the the Precision Conference System (PCS) to handle their paper
and poster submissions and reviewing processes.

Important Dates
---------------

All deadlines are 5:00 PM PST.

June 15 2019: Submissions due for Full and Short Papers.
July 19 2019: Author notification for Full and Short Papers.
August 10 2019: Fast forward deadline.
August 15 2019: Camera ready submission and copyright forms.
August 3 2019: Submissions due for Poster Abstracts.
August 17 2019: Author notification for Posters.
October 23 2019: VizSec 2019.

2019 Organizing Committee
-------------------------

Robert Gove, General Co-Chair, Two Six Labs.
Dustin Arendt, General Co-Chair, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Celeste Paul, Publication Chair, US Department of Defense.
Jörn Kohlhammer, Program Co-Chair, Fraunhofer IGD.
Marco Angelini, Program Co-Chair, University of Rome La Sapienza.
Chris Bryan, Poster Co-Chair, Arizona State University.
Sean McKenna, Poster Co-Chair, Lucid Software Inc.
Nicolas Prigent, Publicity Chair, LSTI.
Parnian Najafi, Sponsorship Chair, FireEye, Inc.
Awalin Sopan, Web Chair, FireEye, Inc.


Steering Committee
------------------

Greg Conti, IronNet Cybersecurity.
Deborah Frincke, National Security Agency.
John Gerth, Stanford University.
John Goodall, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Lane Harrison, Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Kwan-Liu Ma, University of California at Davis.
Kirsten Whitley, U.S. Department of Defense.
Sophie Engle, University of San Francisco.
Diane Staheli, MIT Lincoln Laboratory.