Workshops

Workshop on Byzantine Consensus and Resilient Blockchains (BCRB 2018)

https://bcrb18.fim.uni-passau.de/

This workshop aims at giving researchers a forum to exchange and discuss scientific ideas on open challenges regarding Byzantine consensus in general and specifically on resilient blockchains and distributed ledgers. We want to foster discussion and information exchange between these two (overlapping) communities. The workshop provides a forum for discussing novel trends in blockchain technology and the role of Byzantine consensus/BFT technology in the development of resilient blockchain technology. It aims at identifying novel threats and attacks to blockchain and BFT technologies, as well as at promoting discussions on methods and system support for improving the resilience and scalability. The workshop shall contribute to identifying new application areas for blockchain and BFT, and identifying open problems and future research challenges for BFT, including the impact of new hardware developments on BFT consensus and blockchain technology.

3rd Workshop on Security and Dependability of Critical Embedded Real-Time Systems (CERTS 2018)

https://certs2018.uni.lu

At their heart, many critical systems and system infrastructures are composed of real-time and embedded systems (RTES). For example, RTES control our power grids, maintain our smart homes, steer our vehicles or they host the software in road-side units that allow our vehicles to drive more safely and more efficiently. For sure, they will open the way to even more challenging applications, such as in autonomous and cooperating vehicles, terrestrial or aerial.

However, most of these RTES are distributed or networked, which makes them vulnerable both to accidental faults and targeted attacks and advanced and persistent threats. Worse, compromise of a few nodes may bring down the entire system, in particular if attacks persist.

The grand challenges brought in by these scenarios include ensuring continuous unmaintained operation under faults and attacks. Systems may possibly utilize easier to upgrade computation resources in mobile phones or road side units whose trustworthiness needs to be established while the RTES approaches these units. And while attackers may try to compromise the RTES’ functionality or timing, we seek to protect the integrity and timeliness of systems and the privacy of their users. Mastering these challenges requires the expertise of several research areas, and so, the goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and engineers from the security and dependability, distributed systems and real-time communities, in order to discuss and promote new and exciting research ideas and initiatives, and to identify and discuss the challenges that lie ahead for such critical applications.

Dependable and Secure Machine Learning (DSML 2018)

https://dependablesecureml.github.io

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly used in critical domains such as health and wellness, criminal sentencing recommendations, commerce, transportation, human capital management, entertainment, and communication. The design of ML systems has mainly focused on developing models, algorithms, and datasets on which they are trained to demonstrate high accuracy for specific tasks such as object recognition and classification. Machine learning algorithms typically construct a model by training on a labeled training dataset and their performance is assessed based on the accuracy in predicting labels for unseen (but often similar) testing data. This is based on the assumption that the training dataset is representative of the inputs that the system will face in deployment. However, in practice there are a wide variety of unexpected accidental, as well as adversarially-crafted, perturbations on the ML inputs that might lead to violations of this assumption. Further, ML algorithms are often executed on special-purpose hardware accelerators, which may themselves be subject to faults. Thus, there is a growing concern regarding the reliability, safety, security, and accountability of machine learning systems.

The DSML workshop is intended to provide an open forum for researchers, practitioners, and the regulatory experts, to present and discuss innovative ideas and practical techniques and tools for producing dependable and secure ML systems. A major goal of the workshop is to draw the attention of the research community to the problem of establishing guarantees of reliability, security, safety, and robustness for systems that incorporate increasingly complex machine learning models, and to the challenge of determining whether such systems can comply with requirements set by regulations and standards for safety-critical systems.

4th International Workshop on MILS: Architecture and Assurance for Secure Systems (MILS 2018)

http://mils-workshop.mils.community

Motivations, goals, relevance to the dependability community Dependability and its assurance can be based on architecture. MILS is a high-assurance security architecture based on the concepts of separation and controlled information flow. The MILS architectural approach is all about decomposition of a system design into well-understood components and their interactions with the goal to achieve composable architecture and composable assurance for the designed system. The composability of architecture and assurance for secure systems is a grand challenge, which we undertake to meet using the MILS architectural approach. Architecture composition defines a secure system from trustworthy components and system architecture. The MILS framework for composable architecture is based on a separation kernel (which has overlapping functionality with a hypervisor) or distributed system that creates partitions to separate different security domains. Such a separation kernel or distributed system often needs to support real-time because there are many use-cases in embedded systems. Assurance composition targets creating an assurance argument for the overall system from arguments of its components and the system’s security architecture. The workshop also welcomes contributions on the industrial application of the MILS architecture, assurance and certification frameworks, attack methods and templates for MILS systems, as well as presenting the MILS community.

4th Workshop on Safety and Security of Intelligent Vehicles (SSIV 2018)

https://www.lsec.icmc.usp.br/ssiv

Over the last years, aerial and ground vehicles as well as mobile robot systems have been receiving an increased number of electronic components, connected through wireless networks and running embedded software. This strong integration between dedicated computing devices, the physical environment and networking, composes a Cyber-Physical System (CPS). CPS have thus become part of common vehicles, accessible to everyone, such as automobiles or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Furthermore, as processing power increases and software becomes more sophisticated, these vehicles gain the ability to perform complex operations, becoming more autonomous, efficient, adaptable, comfortable, safe and usable. These are known as Intelligent Vehicles (IV). This will be the fourth edition of the workshop, aiming at continuing the success of previous editions. The workshop will keep its focus on exploring the challenges and interdependencies between security, real-time, safety and certification, which emerge when introducing networked, autonomous and cooperative functionalities.