VizSec 2023

Welcome to 20th IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security

VizSec 2023 will be held in conjunction with IEEE VIS Conference on Sunday, October 22, 2023 2:00pm - 5:00pm in Melbourne, Australia. VizSec brings together researchers and practitioners in information visualization and security to address the specific needs of the cyber security community through new and insightful visualization techniques.

To register for VizSec, see the IEEE VIS registration page.

Questions? Please email chair@vizsec.org for questions regarding VizSec 2023.

Program

All times are local Time (AEDT, UTC+11)

Keynote

Security-aware data provenance to support cybersecurity situational awareness

Carsten Rudolph
Monash University, Oceania Cyber Security Centre OCSC

Abstract

Cybersecurity in distributed processes and systems often relies on a combination of individual local security controls and security protocols to protect communication. This means that in individual steps in the process there is limited situational awareness on the current security posture of the participating entities and on the protections applied to data in the process. Thus, people interacting with the systems don't have sufficient information to estimate cybersecurity risks at real-time. Security-aware provenance data can potentially improve this situation and existing research shows that various security meta-data is, in principle, available, but currently not used. One challenge is the sheer amount of available information and it is obvious that automation and suitable visualisation would be required to enable humans to digest this data and to react on changes in risks.

Biography

Carsten Rudolph is Professor for Cybersecurity and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of IT, Monash University, and Director for Research of the Oceania Cyber Security Centre OCSC in Melbourne, Australia. Before joining Monash, he was Head of Research Department for Trust and Compliance at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT, Darmstadt, Germany and lead several large-scale European research initiatives. His research concentrates on information security, formal methods, cryptographic protocols, security of machine learning and human aspects of security with a strong focus interdisciplinary topics. He contributes to the development of secure solutions for different areas, such as digital health or future energy networks. Further, he drives scientific exchange between cybersecurity, law and organisational informatics. Another focus of his research is on nation-level cybersecurity maturity and policy development. Dr. Rudolph has established the OCSC and oversees the OCSC’s program for national cybersecurity maturity reviews in the Pacific region, a collaboration with Oxford University.

VizSec 2023 Call for Papers

We cordially invite you to participate in the 20th IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec) 2023. VizSec brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, government, and industry to address the needs of the cybersecurity 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 as an Associated Event with IEEE VIS taking place October 22 - 27 in Melbourne, Australia. As an Associated Event, the VizSec program will be an in-person event.

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, penetration testing, and other related research topics.

We are soliciting Technical (Full), Short, Position Papers and Presentation-Only (Non Archival) submissions.

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 & explainable AI for cybersecurity
• Adversarial machine learning visualization
• Adversarial visualization
• Visual analytics for cybersecurity
• Data protection & privacy
• Blockchain performance & security
• Cybersecurity in critical infrastructure
• Collaborative visualization for cybersecurity & provenance
• Decision support for 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 systems
• Criteria for assessing the effectiveness of cyber security visualizations, for security goals or human factors
• System modeling and network analysis
• Usable Security and Privacy
• Software security
• Mobile application security
• Social networking privacy and security
• Training & education
• Visualization for privacy engineering

Submissions including tests and evaluations of the proposed tools and techniques are also considered particularly desirable. If possible, making test data 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 VizSec dataset links. Please see past years proceedings and websites to see the quality and examples of previous submissions. Previous VizSec papers may also be found on the VizSec Papers Browser and on IEEE Xplore.

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.

Position Papers

Position papers focus on topics needing or calling for discussion or reconsideration of forgotten topics relevant for the VizSec community. They should report a clear position on the target topic and should also suggest a proposal or actions regarding the target topic. They should stimulate imaginative and hypothesis-driven research. In particular, we encourage submissions both from researchers inside the visualization community and outside, such as researchers and practitioners from pure cybersecurity domains who currently do not broadly employ visualization in their work.

Presentation-Only

Presentation submissions are non-archival submissions and may describe late-breaking results, work in progress, preliminary results, demonstrations that present concrete examples of successful applications of visualization techniques in industry settings, practical challenges, insights gained from experience, best practices, future directions, and emerging trends relevant to the VizSec community. There will be a dedicated session where speakers can showcase the latest developments in the field, share their findings, present future directions and challenges, and discuss with conference participants. We encourage submissions from both academia and industry, as this will enable fruitful exchanges and foster collaboration between these two communities. Our goal is to create a forum where attendees can learn from each other, discuss emerging trends, and share insights on addressing practical challenges academia and industry face.

Awards

There will be an award for the best full 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. We plan to recommend the best full paper in a special issue of the journal, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG).

Paper Submissions

The VizSec 2023 Proceedings will be published by IEEE. Submissions must be formatted using the IEEE VGTC conference proceedings template that can be found at: https://tc.computer.org/vgtc/publications/conference/

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 must be at most 4 pages plus 1 page of references. Position papers must be at most 4 pages total including references.

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.

Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Generated Text
The use of artificial intelligence (AI)–generated text in an article shall be disclosed in the acknowledgements section of any paper submitted. The sections of the paper that use AI-generated text shall have a citation to the AI system used to generate the text.

How to submit:
Go to https://new.precisionconference.com/submissions, then make a new submission to Society: VGTC, Conference/Journal: VIS 2023, Track: VIS 2023 VizSec

Presentation Submissions

Presentation-only submissions must be 2-page proposals including a presentation title, a brief presentation abstract (maximum 30 words), a description of the presentation topic, a description of the target audience, and biographies of the presenters. Presenters may also submit an accompanying slide or other supplementary materials by following the IEEE VIS formatting guidelines.

How to submit:
Go to https://new.precisionconference.com/submissions, then make a new submission to Society: VGTC, Conference/Journal: VIS 2023, Track: VIS 2023 VizSec Presentation-only.

Committees

Organizing Committee

• Lyndsey Franklin, General Chair
  Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Xumeng Wang, Program Co-Chair
  Nankai University
• Aritra Dasgupta, Program Co-Chair
  New Jersey Institute of Technology
• Adrian Komandina, Publication Chair
  University of Zagreb
• Kuhu Gupta, Presentation Track Chair
  Illumio
• TBA, Publicity Chair
  
• Alex Ulmer, Web Chair
  Fraunhofer IGD

Program Committee

• Arnav Aghav Arizona State University
• Marco Angelini University of Rome "La Sapienza"
• Anjana Arunkumar Arizona State University
• Kaustav Bhattacharjee Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Siming Chen Fudan University
• Robertas Damaševičiu Kaunas University of Technology
• Xiaohan Ding Virginia Tech
• Mai Elshehaly University of London
• Mohammad Ghoniem Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology
• Steven Gomez MIT Lincoln Laboratory
• Robert Gove CrowdStrike
• Ridhima Gupta Databricks
• Jörn Kohlhammer Fraunhofer IGD
• Frédéric Majorczyk DGA-MI
• Jiacheng Pan Zhejiang University
• Christopher Simpson National University
• David Trimm U.S. Department of Defense
• Alex Ulmer Fraunhofer IGD

Steering Committee

• Marco Angelini University of Rome La Sapienza
• Dustin Arendt Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Chris Bryan Arizona State University
• Robert Gove CrowdStrike
• Jörn Kohlhammer Fraunhofer IGD
• Diane Staheli MIT Lincoln Laboratory