1st IEEE International Workshop on Self-Protecting Systems
in conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing
(ICAC 2019) and 13th International Conference on Self-Adaptive and
Self-Organizing Systems (SASO 2019)
June 16 - 20, Umeå, Sweden

Web site: https://sites.google.com/view/sps19/


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 4-5 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 based on the Monitor, Analyze, Plan, Execute (MAPE) loop for autonomic systems, control theory, bio-inspired solutions, Self-Regenerative Systems, and the like. 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 and secure data collection and storage for sensing/monitoring
- Automated Feature Selection approaches to reduce data dimensionality on cyber-security relevant data
- Techniques for automatic correlation of data streams
- Self-Evolving Anomaly-Based and Signature-Based Network/Host Intrusion Detection Systems
- Attack and defense modeling for threats detection and risk management
- Self-Evolving Model-based and Model-free Intrusion response
- Attack and defense modeling for reactive and proactive intrusion response
- Foundational results for self-protecting systems: Algorithms, artificial intelligence, biological-inspired techniques, control theory, machine learning, operation research, probability and stochastic processes, queueing theory, rule-based systems, and socially-inspired techniques
- Software engineering for self-protecting systems: System architectures, services, components and platforms, Goal specification and policies, modeling of security-level agreements, behavior enforcement, IT governance, and security-driven IT management
- Implementation of prototypes that integrate cutting edge technologies, e.g., Software Defined Networks, Cloud/Fog/edge computing, Artificial Intelligence, micro-services
- Holistic perspective on self-protecting systems i.e., researches that consider the overall picture and propose novel software architectures, frameworks and technologies to ease the realization of self-protecting systems.

PUBLICATION:
Accepted workshop papers will be published in the proceedings and submitted for inclusion to IEEE Xplore. Papers must thus be in the same format as the conference proceedings and may not be more than 6 pages in length.

Papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format according to the instructions on the main conference submission instruction website (http://icac2019.cs.umu.se/calls/submission-instructions/).

We are in contact with the FGCS Elsevier Journal to organize a special issue on Self-Protecting Systems. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their work.

DEADLINES
Paper submission: March 15th, 2019 (strict)
Acceptance notification: April 15th, 2019
Camera-ready papers: April 20th, 2019

CO-CHAIRS
Emiliano Casalicchio, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy and Blekinge
Institute of Technology, Sweden
Stefano Iannucci, Mississippi State University, MS ,USA
Byron J. Williams, University of Florida, FL, USA

TECHNICAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Hisham A. Kholidy, State University of New York (SUNY) Polytechnic Institute, USA
Sherif Abdelwahed, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA
Tanmay Bhowmik, Mississippi State University, USA
Giuseppe Bianchi, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy
Vincent Bindschaedler, University of Florida, USA
Paolo Campegiani, Bit4id, Italy
Long Cheng, Clemson University, USA
Naeem Esfahani, Google Inc., USA
Ulrik Franke, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Sweden
Yingjiu Li, Singapore Management University, Republic of Singapore
Sam Malek, University of California at Irvine, USA
Luigi V. Mancini, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Erik Miehling University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Leslie Milton, U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), USA
Andrea Montemaggio, Mississippi State University, USA
Alireza Shameli Sendi, Shahid Beheshti University, Iran
Craig Shorter, National Strategic Planning and Analysis Research Center (NSPARC), USA
Kazi Zakia Sultana, Montclair State University, USA
Cihan Tunc, University of Arizona, USA
Daniele Venturi, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Eric Yuan, Aerospace Corporation, USA
Saman Zonouz, Rutgers University, USA
... TBC ...