Monthly Archives: June 2016

CFP: Passwords 2016

Call for papers

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Call for Papers
The 11th International Conference on Passwords
PASSWORDS 2016

5-7 December 2016
Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany

https://passwords2016.rub.de/
https://passwordscon.org/
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The Passwords conference was launched in 2010 as a response to
the lack of robustness and usability of current personal
authentication practices and solutions. Annual participation has
doubled over the past three years. Since 2014, the conference
accepts peer-reviewed papers.

* IMPORTANT DATES *

Research papers and short papers:
– Title and abstract submission: EXTENDED TO 2016-08-22 2016-07-04  (23:59 UTC-11)
– Paper submission: EXTENDED TO 2016-08-29 2016-07-11 (23:59 UTC-11)
– Notification of acceptance: 2016-10-17 2016-09-05
– Camera-ready from authors: 2016-10-31 2016-09-19

Hacker Talks:
– Talk proposal submission: 2016-09-15 (23:59 UTC-11)
– Notification of acceptance: 2016-09-30

* CONFERENCE AIM *

More than half a billion user passwords have been compromised
over the last five years, including breaches at internet
companies such as Target, Adobe, Heartland, Forbes, LinkedIn,
Yahoo, and LivingSocial. Yet passwords, PIN codes, and similar
remain the most prevalent method of personal
authentication. Clearly, we have a systemic problem.

This conference gathers researchers, password crackers, and
enthusiastic experts from around the globe, aiming to better
understand the challenges surrounding the methods personal
authentication and passwords, and how to adequately solve these
problems. The Passwords conference series seek to provide a
friendly environment for participants with plenty opportunity to
communicate with the speakers before, during, and after their
presentations.

* SCOPE *

We seek original contributions that present attacks, analyses,
designs, applications, protocols, systems, practical experiences,
and theory. Submitted papers may include, but are not limited to,
the following topics, all related to passwords and
authentication:

– Technical challenges and issues:
– Cryptanalytic attacks
– Formal attack models
– Cryptographic protocols
– Dictionary attacks
– Digital forensics
– Online attacks/Rate-limiting
– Side-channel attacks
– Administrative challenges:
– Account lifecycle management
– User identification
– Password resets
– Cross-domain and multi-enterprise system access
– Hardware token administration
– Password “replacements”:
– 2FA and multifactor authentication
– Risk-based authentication
– Password managers
– Costs and economy
– Biometrics
– Continous authentication
– FIDO – U2F
– Deployed systems:
– Best practice reports
– Incident reports/Lessons learned
– Human factors:
– Usability
– Design & UX
– Social Engineering
– Memorability
– Accessibility
– Pattern predictability
– Gestures and graphical patterns
– Psychology
– Statistics (languages, age, demographics…)
– Ethics

* INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS *

Papers must be submitted as PDF using the Springer LNCS format
for Latex. Abstract and title must be submitted one week ahead of
the paper deadline.

We seek submissions for review in the following three categories:

– Research Papers
– Short Papers
– “Hacker Talks” (talks without academic papers attached)

RESEARCH PAPERS should describe novel, previously unpublished
technical contributions within the scope of the call. The papers
will be subjected to double-blind peer review by the program
committee. Paper length is limited to 16 pages (LNCS format)
excluding references and well-marked appendices. The paper
submitted for review must be anonymous, hence author names,
affiliations, acknowledgements, or obvious references must be
temporarily edited out for the review process. The program
committee may reject non-anonymized papers without reading
them. The submitted paper (in PDF format) must follow the
template described by Springer at
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

SHORT PAPERS will also be subject to peer review, where the
emphasis will be put on work in progress, hacker achievements,
industrial experiences, and incidents explained, aiming at
novelty and promising directions. Short paper submissions should
not be more than 6 pages in standard LNCS format in total. A
short paper must be labeled by the subtitle “Short
Paper”. Accepted short paper submissions may be included in the
conference proceedings. Short papers do not need to be
anonymous. The program committee may accept full research papers
as short papers.

HACKER TALKS are presentations without an academic paper
attached. They will typically explain new methods, techniques,
tools, systems, or services within the Passwords scope. Proposals
for Hacker Talks can be submitted by anybody (“hackers”,
academics, students, enthusiasts, etc.) in any format, but
typically will include a brief (2-3 paragraphs) description of
the talk’s content and the person presenting. They will be
evaluated by a separate subcommittee led by Per Thorsheim,
according to different criteria than those used for the refereed
papers.

At least one of the authors of each accepted paper must register
and present the paper at the workshop. Papers without a full
registration will be withdrawn from the proceedings and from the
workshop programme.

Papers that pass the peer review process and that are presented
at the workshop will be included in the event proceedings,
published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer
Science (LNCS) series.

Papers must be unpublished and not being considered elsewhere for
publication. Plagiarism and self-plagiarism will be treated as a
serious offense.  Program committee members may submit papers but
program chairs may not.  The time frame for each presentation
will be either 30 or 45 minutes, including Q&A. Publication will
be by streaming, video and web.

* ORGANIZERS *

– General chair: Per Thorsheim, God Praksis AS (N)
– Program co-chair and host: Markus Dürmuth, Ruhr-University Bochum (DE)
– Program co-chair: Frank Stajano, University of Cambridge (UK)

* PROGRAM COMMITTEE *

– Adam Aviv, United States Naval Academy (USA)
– Lujo Bauer, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
– Jeremiah Blocki, Microsoft Research/Purdue University (USA)
– Joseph Bonneau, Stanford University (USA)
– Heather Crawford, Florida Institute of Technology (USA)
– Bruno Crispo, KU Leuven (B) and University of Trento (IT)
– Serge Egelman, ICSI and University of California at Berkeley (USA)
– David Freeman, LinkedIn (USA)
– Simson Garfinkel, NIST (USA)
– Tor Helleseth, University of Bergen (N)
– Cormac Herley, Microsoft Research (USA)
– Graeme Jenkinson, University of Cambridge (UK)
– Mike Just, Heriot-Watt University (UK)
– Stefan Lucks, Bauhaus-University Weimar (D)
– Paul van Oorschot, Carleton University (CA)
– Angela Sasse, University College London (UK)
– Elizabeth Stobert, ETH Zurich (CH)

* STEERING COMMITTEE *

– Per Thorsheim, God Praksis AS (N)
– Stig F. Mjolsnes, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (N)
– Frank Stajano, University of Cambridge (UK)

More and updated information can be found at the conference website
https://passwords2016.rub.de/

Inaugural Cybercrime Conference

Cybercrime, Security economics

The Cambridge Cloud Cybercrime Centre is organising an inaugural one day conference on cybercrime on Thursday, 14th July 2016.

In future years we intend to focus on research that has been carried out using datasets provided by the Cybercrime Centre, but for this first year we have a stellar group of invited speakers who are at the forefront of their fields:

  • Adam Bossler, Associate Professor, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Georgia Southern University, USA
  • Alice Hutchings, Post-doc Criminologist, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
  • David S. Wall, Professor of Criminology, University of Leeds, UK
  • Maciej Korczynski Post-Doctoral Researcher, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
  • Michael Levi, Professor of Criminology, Cardiff University, UK
  • Mike Hulett, Head of Operations, National Cyber Crime Unit, National Crime Agency, UK
  • Nicolas Christin, Assistant Research Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
  • Richard Clayton, Director, Cambridge Cloud Cybercrime Centre, University of Cambridge, UK
  • Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
  • Tyler Moore, Tandy Assistant Professor of Cyber Security & Information Assurance, University of Tulsa, USA

They will present various aspects of cybercrime from the point of view of criminology, security economics, cybersecurity governance and policing.

This one day event, to be held in the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge will follow immediately after (and will be in the same venue as) the “Ninth International Conference on Evidence Based Policing” organised by the Institute of Criminology which runs on the 12th and 13th July 2016.

For more details see here.

Cambridge and Brexit

Politics, Security economics

If the UK leaves the European Union, it will cost Cambridge University about £100m, or about 10% of our turnover.

I present the details in an article today in the Cambridge News.

I reckon we will lose at least £60m of the £69m we get in European grants, at least £20m of our £237m fee income (most of which is from foreign students), at least £10m from Cambridge Assessment and Cambridge University Press, and £5m each from industry and charities. Although I’m an elected member of Council (the governing body) and the committee that sets the budget, all this comes from our published accounts.

And my estimates are conservative; the outcome could easily be worse, especially if foreign students desert us, or just can’t get visas after a popular vote against immigration.

Now everyone on Britain pays on average £4 a year to the EU and gets £2 back. The net contribution of £2 amounts to £12.5m for a town the size of Cambridge. The University alone is getting more than four times that back directly, and yet more indirectly. And the same goes for many other university towns too; even Newcastle gets more than would be raised by everyone in the city paying £2 a year.

But this is not just about money; it’s about who we are, and also about what other people perceive us to be. If Britain votes to leave Europe following a xenophobic campaign against immigrants, people overseas may conclude that Britain is to longer a cool place to study, or to start a research lab. Even some of the people already here will leave. We will do the best we can to keep the flame alight, but it will be very much harder for Cambridge to remain a world-leading university.

See also the Cambridge News editorial, and my piece yesterday on Brexit and tech.

The tech industry and Brexit

Politics, Security economics

The debate on whether Britain should leave the EU has largely ignored a factor of huge importance to the tech industry – network effects.

So I’ve written an article on what Brexit means for the tech industry from the viewpoint of information economics.

Network effects mean that the value of a transaction often depends on how many other people make similar transactions. They make our industry prone to monopolies. They ensure that the UK, with 1% of world population and 3% of GDP, has little influence on tech markets, which are mostly global. But the EU has real clout; Silicon Valley sees it as the world privacy regulator, as Washington doesn’t care and no-one else is big enough to matter. And most of the other regulations that IT people find annoying, from IP laws to export controls, are also embedded in international treaties. We can’t just tear up the annoying “red tape”, as the Brexit crowd suggest.

Brexit would not only diminish our influence on the laws that affect tech – many of which reflect negative network effects. It would make startups more expensive, so UK firms would have a harder time exploiting the positive network effects that are often the key to success. And it would damage the successful tech clusters we do have in Cambridge and in London.

Tech clusters need a number of things to thrive; and it’s not just technical network effects that matter, but labour-market network effects too. And there’s quite a lot of research on that. As good engineers can earn good money and live wherever we want, we congregate in places that are good places to live. They are always open and liberal places, where it’s fine to be from an ethnic minority, or an immigrant, or gay. What would the world’s best and brightest engineers think about moving to Britain if we vote for xenophobia on Thursday?

The article is in Computer Weekly, and there’s also a pdf here.