VizSec 2012 - The International Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec)

The International Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec) is a forum that brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, government, and industry to address the needs of the cyber security community through new and insightful visualization techniques. Co-located this year with VisWeek, the 9th VizSec will provide new opportunities for the usability and visualization communities to collaborate and share insights on a broad range of security-related topics. Accepted papers will appear in the ACM Digital Library as part of the ACM International Conference Proceedings Series.
Important research problems often lie at the intersection of disparate domains. Our focus is to explore effective, scalable visual interfaces for security domains, where visualization may provide a distinct benefit, including computer forensics, reverse engineering, insider threat detection, cryptography, privacy, preventing 'user assisted' attacks, compliance management, wireless security, secure coding, and penetration testing in addition to traditional network security. Human time and attention are precious resources. We are particularly interested in visualization and interaction techniques that effectively capture human analyst insights so that further processing may be handled by machines, freeing the analyst for other tasks. For example, a malware analyst might use a visualization system to analyze a new piece of malicious software and then facilitate generating a signature for future machine processing. When appropriate, research that incorporates multiple data sources, such as network packet captures, firewall rule sets and logs, DNS logs, web server logs, and/or intrusion detection system logs, is particularly desirable.
Technical Papers
Full papers offering novel contributions in security visualization are solicited. Papers may present techniques, applications, practical experience, theory, analysis, or experiments and evaluations. We encourage papers on technologies and methods that have been demonstrated to be useful for improving cyber security practices, including but not limited to:
Situational awareness / understanding
Incident handling including triage, exploration, correlation, and response
Computer forensics
Recording and reporting results of investigation
Reverse engineering and malware analysis
Privacy
Multiple data source analysis
Analyzing information requirements for computer network defense
Evaluation / User testing of VizSec systems
Criteria for assessing the effectiveness of cyber security visualizations (whether from a security goal perspective or a human factors perspective)
Modeling system and network behavior
Modeling attacker and defender behavior
Studying risk and impact of cyber attacks
Predicting future attacks or targets
Security metrics and education
Lessons learned
Accepted papers will appear in the ACM Digital Library two weeks prior to the conference. The program committee will select an accepted paper to receive the VizSec Best Paper award. A key element of the best paper selection process will be whether the results are believed to be repeatable by other scientists based on the algorithms and data provided in the paper.
Awards
There will be an award for the best paper from the accepted program. The best paper award will be given to the paper judged to have the highest overall quality. A key element of the best paper selection process will be whether the results are believed to be repeatable by other scientists based on the algorithms and data provided in the paper. This award will be chosen by the program committee.
Data
If you do not have real-world data to demonstrate your visualization, you may be interested in looking at, and perhaps submitting an entry, for this year's VAST Challenge.
Last year's challenge also had cybersecurity data if you are looking for additional data.
Submissions
Papers
Papers should be at most 8 pages including the bibliography and appendices. Committee members are not required to read the appendices or any pages past the maximum. Submissions not meeting these guidelines will be rejected without consideration of their merits. 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, preferably by themselves or by prior arrangement through a delegate.
Paper Formatting
The VizSec proceedings will be published by ACM. The ACM SIG Proceedings Templates provides Word and LaTeX templates.
Authors should apply ACM Computing Classification categories and terms. ACM invites authors to submit an image representation of their article. The image must be selected from the article body and can be any of the following: art, graphic, table, figures, etc. (Image files are to be as square as possible, 100x100 ppi and in jpg format.) Authors must supply a caption with the image. The caption length should be no more than 512 characters.
Submission
Submit papers using EasyChair: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vizsec2...
Dates
July 1, 2012
Paper Submission
August 10, 2012
Author Notification
September 1, 2012
Camera Ready Submission and Copyright forms
October 1, 2012
Papers available in ACM Digital Library
October 14 or 15, 2012
VizSec
Hotel
VizSec will be held in conjunction with VisWeek at the Seattle Sheraton Hotel.
See the VisWeek hotel reservations page for information about the conference room rate.
Committee
General Chair
Dino Schweitzer, United States Air Force Academy
Program Chair
Daniel Quist, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Publications Chair
John Goodall, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Program Committee
David Barrera, Carleton University
Richard Bejtlich, TaoSecurity
Greg Conti, US Military Academy at West Point
Ron Dilley, UberAdmin
David Ebert, Purdue University
Alex Endert, Virginia Tech
Rob Erbacher, Army Research Laboratory
Carrie Gates, CA Technologies
John Gerth, Stanford University
Mark Haselkorn, University of Washington
Tyler Hudak, KoreLogic Security
Kohlhammer Jörn, Fraunhofer IGD
Florian Mansmann, Universität Konstanz
Raffael Marty, PixlCloud
Jan Monsch, Google
Stephen North, AT&T
Teryl Taylor, University of North Carolina
Olivier Thonnard, Symantec
Joanne Treurniet, Defence Research and Development Canada
Pak Chung Wong, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Anatoly Yelizarov, Lomonosov Moscow State University
Tamara Yu, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Daniel Best, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Contact
Email questions about VizSec 2012 to Dino Schweitzer: dino.schweitzer-AT-gmail.com