FCS 2019

Workshop on Foundations of Computer Security 2019

June 24, 2019
Hoboken, NJ, USA

Affiliated with CSF2019

Background, aim and scope

Computer security is an established field of both theoretical and practical significance. In recent years, there has been sustained interest in the formal foundations of methods used in computer security. The aim of the FCS 2019 workshop is to provide a forum for the discussion of continued research in this area.

FCS 2019 welcomes papers on all topics related to the formal underpinnings of security and privacy, and their applications. The scope of FCS 2019 includes, but is not limited to, formal specification, analysis, and design of cryptographic protocols and their applications; formal definitions of various aspects of security such as access control mechanisms, mobile code security and denial-of-service attacks; modeling of information flow and its application to confidentiality policies, system composition, and covert channel analysis; foundations of privacy; applications of formal techniques to practical security and privacy.

We are interested in new theoretical results, in exploratory presentations that examine open questions and raise fundamental concerns about existing theories, and in the development of security/privacy tools using formal techniques. Demonstrations of tools based on formal techniques are welcome, as long as the demonstrations can be carried out on a standard digital projector (i.e., without any specialized equipment). We solicit the submission of both mature work and work in progress.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Automated reasoning techniques
Composition issues
Formal specification
Foundations of verification
Information flow analysis
Language-based security
Logic-based design
Program transformation
Security models
Static analysis
Statistical methods
Tools
Trust management

for

Access control & resource usage control
Authentication
Availability and denial of service
Covert channels
Confidentiality
Integrity and privacy
Intrusion detection
Malicious code
Mobile code
Mutual distrust
Privacy
Security policies
Security protocols

Program

  • 8:30 - 9:15: Registration
  • 9:15 - 10:30: Opening and Invited talk by Rafael Pass, on the Foundations of Blockchain. (Chair: Elaine Shi)
  • 10:30 - 11:00: Coffee Break
  • 11:00 - 12:30 Session 1: Information Flows (Chair: Joshua Guttman)
    • Spectector: Principled Detection of Speculative Information Flows. Marco Guarnieri, Boris Köpf, Jose F. Morales, Jan Reineke and Andrés Sánchez. [PDF]
    • First-Order Logic for Flow-Limited Authorization. Andrew Hirsch, Pedro H. Azevedo de Amorim, Ethan Cecchetti, Ross Tate and Owen Arden. [PDF]
    • Security Criteria for a Transparent Encryption Layer. Konstantinos Kallas, Clara Schneidewind, Benjamin Pierce and Steve Zdancewic. [PDF]
  • 12:30 - 14:30 Lunch
  • 14:30 - 16:10 Session 2: Protocols & Secure Compilation (Chair: Charles Morisset)
    • Understanding Attestation: Analyzing Protocols that use Quotes. Joshua Guttman and John Ramsdell. [PDF]
    • Formalising Oblivious Transfer in the Semi-Honest and Malicious Model in CryptHOL. David Butler, David Aspinall and Adria Gascon. [PDF]
    • `No Miracles' in Security Protocol Analysis (Short Paper). Will Nalls. [PDF]
    • Weird Machines as Insecure Compilation (Short Paper). Jennifer Paykin, Eric Mertens, Mark Tullsen, Luke Maurer, Benoit Razet and Scott Moore. [PDF]

Important dates

Submissions for full papers (Extended): April 25th 2019 (AOE)
Notification of acceptance: May 6th 2019 (AOE)
Deadline for short papers (5 to 10 minutes, 1 page abstract): May 17th 2019
Notification for short talks May 31st 2019

Submission

FCS 2019 welcomes two kinds of submissions:

  • full papers (at most 12 pages, excluding references and well-marked appendices)
  • short papers (at most 1 page, excluding references and well-marked appendices)

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by the program committee listed below. Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their papers will be presented at the workshop. Extended abstracts will receive as rigorous a review as full papers. Extended abstracts may receive shorter talk slots at the workshop than full papers, depending on the number of accepted submissions.

Papers should be formatted using the two-column IEEE proceedings style available for various document preparation systems at the IEEE Conference Publishing Services page http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html. The first page should include the paper's title, names of authors, coordinates of the corresponding author(s), an abstract, and a list of keywords. Committee members are not required to read appendices, so papers must be intelligible without them. Papers not adhering to the page limits may be rejected without consideration of their merits.

Papers must be submitted online (address TBC) in the PDF format. Please do not submit papers in any other format (e.g., Word).

Papers should be submitted through EasyChair, at the following address: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fcs19:

Informal proceedings

The workshop has no published proceedings. Presenting a paper at the workshop should not preclude submission to or publication in other venues (before, after or concurrently with FCS 2019). Papers presented at the workshop will be made available to workshop participants, but this does not constitute an official proceedings.

Program committee

  • David Aspinall (Edinburgh University, UK)
  • Myrto D. Arapinis (Edinburgh University, UK)
  • Owen Arden (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA)
  • Kartik Nayak (VMWare Research and Duke University, USA)
  • Gilad Asharov (JP Morgan and Bar Ilan University, USA)
  • Marco Gaboardi (University of Buffalo, USA)
  • William Mansky (Princeton University, USA)
  • Ilaria Matteucci (Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Italy)
  • Catherine Meadows (NRL, USA)
  • Charles Morisset (Newcastle University, UK) Co-Chair
  • Elaine Shi (Cornell, USA) Co-Chair
  • Sasa Radomirovic (University of Dundee, UK)
  • Marco Vassena (Chalmers, Sweden)
  • Nicola Zannone (Eindhoven, Netherlands)

Contact

The PC chairs can be contacted at the following addresses:
  • Charles Morisset (Newcastle): charles.morisset@ [at] ncl [dot] ac [dot] uk
  • Elaine Shi (Cornell): runting [at] gmail [dot] com

Registration

Registration is done through the main CSF website.

Previous editions