Stu Wagner, Bob Laddaga, and I are pleased to announce the call for papers for a new Workshop on Adaptive Host and Network Security, to take place at the Sixth IEEE Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems in September 2012 in Lyon, France.

Over the past decade the threat of cyber attacks on critical commercial and government infrastructure has been growing at an alarming rate to a point where it is now considered to be a major threat in the world. Current approaches to cyber security involve building fast-growing multi-million line systems that attempt to detect and remove attacking software. Meanwhile, cyber exploits continue to multiply in number, but their size continues to be a couple of hundred lines of code. This disparity of effort means that the current defensive approaches to cyber security can at best fight a holding action. The workshop is intended to explore game-changing approaches to cyber security that focus on adaptation. There is a clear need to develop systems at both the host level and the network level to actively adapt to cyber attacks and to provide greater protection for networked computation at all levels. Topic of interest include:

• Protecting the host
• New OS models for secure hosts
• Combining proof, model checking and dynamic monitoring techniques for host security
• Meta-level control and monitoring of networks
• Use of feedback mechanisms in network operations
• Self-monitoring and self-explaining network systems
• Self-adaptive and autonomic networking
• Centralized versus distributed network control
• Measurement of network properties in support of self evaluation
• Programming language abstractions to support security
• Computational models of network security
• Self healing networks
• Learning in adaptive networks
• Dynamically reprogrammable switches
• The use of a Policy-based Network Management system to build self-adaptively secure networks

The format for this full day workshop is to have a number of short paper presentations, thematically organized discussion and panel sessions, and one invited speaker. The deadline for submissions is 4 July 2012.

The significance of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different areas such as networking, programming languages, computer hardware, and operating systems to gain broad insights into specific research issues related to adaptive host and network security, and to foster discussions about ongoing research, establish directions for future research and collaborations, and identify best practices for adaptive security.

You can learn more in the Call for Papers.