The Computer Security Foundations Symposium is an annual conference for researchers in computer security. CSF seeks papers on foundational aspects of computer security, such as formal security models, relationships between security properties and defenses, principled techniques and tools for design and analysis of security mechanisms, as well as their application to practice. While CSF welcomes submissions beyond the topics listed below, the main focus of CSF is foundational security: submissions that lack foundational aspects risk rejection.

This year, CSF will use a light form of double blind reviewing; see below.

Topics

New results in computer security are welcome. We also encourage challenge/vision papers, which may describe open questions and raise fundamental concerns about security. Possible topics for all papers include, but are not limited to: access control, accountability, anonymity and privacy, authentication, computer-aided cryptography, data and system integrity, database security, decidability and complexity, distributed systems security, electronic voting, formal methods and verification, decision theory, hardware-based security, information flow, intrusion detection, language-based security, network security, data provenance, mobile security, security metrics, security protocols, software security, socio-technical security, trust management, usable security, web security.

Special Sessions

This year, we strongly encourage papers in two foundational areas of research we would like to promote at CSF:

PRIVACY: (Chair: Daniel Kifer). CSF 2016 will include a special session on privacy foundations and invites submissions on innovations in practice, as well as definitions, models, and frameworks for communication and data privacy, principled analysis of deployed or proposed privacy protection mechanisms, and foundational aspects of practical privacy technologies. We especially encourage submissions aiming at connecting the computer science point of view on privacy with that of other disciplines (law, economics, sociology, statistics...)

SECURITY ECONOMICS: (Chair: Jens Grossklags). There is an interplay between important system properties including privacy, security, efficiency, flexibility, and usability. Diverse systems balance these properties differently, and as such provide varied benefits (for users) for different costs (for builders and attackers). In short, securing systems is ultimately an economic question. CSF 2016 will include a special session on security economics, where we invite submissions on foundational work in this area. Topics include, but are not limited to, risk management and cyber-insurance, investments in information security, security metrics, decision and game theory for security, and cryptocurrencies.

These papers will be reviewed under the supervision of the special session chairs. They will be presented at the conference, and will appear in the CSF proceedings, without any distinction from the other papers.

Proceedings, published by the IEEE Computer Society Press (pending approval), will be available at the symposium, and selected papers will be invited for submission to the Journal of Computer Security.