SafeConfig 2010 - 2nd ACM Workshop on Assurable & Usable Security Configuration (SafeConfig)

2nd ACM Workshop on Assurable & Usable Security Configuration (SafeConfig)
October 4, 2010 [ Collocated with ACM CCS 2010 ]

A typical enterprise network might have hundreds of security appliances such
as firewalls, IPSec gateways, IDS/IPS, authentication servers,
authorization/RBAC servers and crypto systems. An enterprise network may
also have other non-security devices such as routers, name servers, protocol
gateways, etc. These must be logically integrated into a security
architecture satisfying security goals at and across multiple networks.
Logical integration is accomplished by consistently setting thousands of
configuration variables and rules on the devices. The configuration must be
constantly adapted to optimize protection and block prospective attacks. The
configuration must be tuned to balance security with usability. These
challenges are compounded by the deployment of mobile devices and ad hoc
networks. The resulting security configuration complexity places a heavy
burden on both regular users and experienced administrators and dramatically
reduces overall network assurability and usability. For example, a December
2008 report from Center for Strategic and International Studies "Securing
Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency" states that "inappropriate or incorrect
security configurations ... were responsible for 80% of Air Force
vulnerabilities" and a May 2008 report from Juniper Networks "What is Behind
Network Downtime?" states that "human factors ... [are] responsible for 50
to 80 percent of network device outages." This workshop will bring together
academic as well as industry researchers to exchange experiences, discuss
challenges and propose solutions for offering assurable and usable security.
This workshop will consist of presentations and panel discussions on the
following topics:

Topics but are not limited to
- Integrating network and host configuration
- Automated forensics and mitigation
- Usability issues in security management
- Metrics for measuring assurability and usability: Usable security
often involves trade offs between security or privacy and usability/utility
- Abstract models and languages for configuration specification
- Configuration refinement and enforcement
- Formal semantics of security policies
- Configuration testing, debugging and evaluation
- Representation of belief, trust, and risk in security policies
- Configuration/misconfiguration visualization
- Configuration reasoning and conflict analysis
- Risk adaptive configuration systems
- Context-aware security configuration for pervasive and mobile computing
- Configuration accountability
- Automated signature and patch management
- Automated alarm management
- Protecting the privacy and integrity of security configuration
- Optimizing security, flexibility and performance
- Measurable metric of flexibility and usability
- Design for flexibility and manageability ? clean slate approach
- Configuration management vs. least-privilege
- Configuration management and delegation issues in name resolution
- Configuration and policy issue in inter-domain routing
- Configuration management issues in virtualized environments
- Configuration Management case studies or user studies

Papers must present original work and must be written in English. We require
that the authors use the ACM format for papers, using one of the ACM SIG
Proceeding Templates, http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.
We solicit two types of papers, regular papers and position papers. The
length of the regular papers in the proceedings format should not exceed 8
US letter pages, excluding well-marked appendices. Committee members are not
required to read the appendices, so papers must be intelligible without
them. Position papers may not exceed 4 pages. Papers are to be submitted
electronically as a single PDF file. Further submission details will be
available on-line. The accepted papers will be published in the workshop
proceedings and the ACM Digital Library in accordance with ACM copyright
policy. Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their papers will be
presented at the conference. Submission instructions will be available at
http://hci.sis.uncc.edu/safeconfig/ .

Important Dates:
Abstract Registration: June 7 (optional)
Submission: June 28
Notification: August 6
Camera Ready: August 16

Organizing Committee

Steering Committee:
Ehab Al-Shaer, UNC Charlotte
Jorge Lobo, IBM Watson
Sanjai Narain, Telcordia

General Chair:
Tony Sager, National Security Agency

TPC Co-Chairs:
Gail-Joon Ahn, Arizona State University
Krishna Kant, Intel/NSF
Heather Richter Lipford, UNC Charlotte

Technical Program Committee:
Elisa Bertino, Purdue University
Konstantin Beznosov, University of British Columbia
Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
Dipankar Dasgupta, Univ. of Memphis
Trent Jaeger, Pennsylvania State University
Chin-Tser Huang, University of South Carolina
John Karat, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
George Kesidis, Pennsylvania State University
Kyung-Hee Lee, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology
Hong Li, Intel Corporation
Ninghui Li, Purdue University
Alex Liu, Michigan State University
Emil Lupu, Imperial College
Roy Maxion, Carnegie Mellon University
Xinming Ou, Kansas State University
Sanjay Rao, Purdue University
Indrajit Ray, Colorado State University
Mohamed Shehab, UNC Charlotte
Subhabrata Sen, AT&T Labs
Rajesh Talpade, Telcordia
Sreedhar Vugranam, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Jeff Yan, Newcastle University