2024 IEEE CSR Workshop on Security, Privacy and Resilience of Critical Assets in Critical Infrastructure (SPARC)

 Call for Papers

Asset discovery in IT and network systems is carried out with substantial tools to provide more accurate and specific information about digital assets. However, with the emergence of cyber-physical systems (CPSs), traditional techniques are not practically useful in providing answers to the key questions about the cyber and physical assets present in the systems. Examples of such systems are electric vehicles (EVs) infrastructure, autonomous vehicles (AVs)/connected AVs (CAVs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), smart grids, and smart manufacturing. Asset discovery in operational technology (OT) and understanding the criticality of its assets are not yet explored enough. These assets could be specific devices such as PLCs, HMI, RTUs, etc., or IoT and Industrial IoT devices, including sensors, actuators, and other related components. Security of such critical assets is crucial in strengthening the security of the CPSs. Similarly, such assets are having privacy concerns and issues considering big data collection and processing at different devices (edge/ cloud/fog). Most importantly, improving and ensuring the resilience of such assets by understanding the impact of cyber-attacks on physical assets will greatly enhance the systems’ cyber resilience. The accelerating adoption of new technologies brings challenges primarily associated with the cyber security and safety of the applications, where confidentiality, integrity, and data availability are crucial. Further, AI techniques can be embraced to improve state-of-the-art understanding of asset criticality and safeguard solutions against cyber attempts on physical and digital assets of CPSs. This workshop aims to explore and develop new research ideas from the wider CPS context focusing on security, privacy and resilience of critical assets.

Topics of Interest

Prospective authors are encouraged to submit previously unpublished contributions from a broad range of topics, which include but are not limited to the following:

› Security, privacy and resilience analysis on IoT/IIoT/IoE assets Risk management and governance for critical asset applications
› Security, privacy and resilience of physical assets in cyber-physical systems
› AI-assisted critical infrastructure security for critical assets
› Detection, prevention, response, and recovery against potential threats to critical assets
› Automated threat modelling for critical assets

› Situational awareness and traceability for critical assets
› Applied crypto for securing critical assets
› Blockchain for trustworthy critical asset applications
› Privacy-preserving techniques for critical assets
› Cyber threat intelligence for critical assets
› Device specific asset criticality (e.g., RTUs, PLCs, etc.)
› Cyber-attacks’ impact on critical assets

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: June 3 June 30, 2024 AoE
Authors’ notification: July 3 July 14, 2024 AoE
Camera-ready submission: July 14 July 20, 2024 AoE
Early registration deadline: July 20, 2024 AoE
Workshop date: September 2-4, 2024

Submission Guidelines

The workshop’s proceedings will be published by IEEE and will be included in IEEE Xplore. The guidelines for authors, manuscript preparation guidelines, and policies of the IEEE CSR conference are applicable to SPARC 2024 workshop. Please visit the authors’ instructions page for more details. When submitting your manuscript via the conference management system, please make sure that the workshop’s track 2T7 SPARC is selected in the Topic Areas drop down list.

Workshop Committees

Workshop chairs

Neetesh Saxena, Cardiff University (UK)
Prosanta Gope, Sheffield University (UK)
Sridhar Adepu, University of Bristol (UK)

Publicity chair

Subhash Lakshminarayana, University of Warwick (UK)
Siraj Ahmed Shaikh, Swansea University (UK)

Contact us

saxenan4@cardiff.ac.uk
p.gope@sheffield.ac.uk
sridhar.adepu@bristol.ac.uk

Program committee

Chuadhry Mujeeb Ahmed, Newcastle University (UK)
Ali Ismail Awad, UAE University (AE)
John Henry Castellanos, CISPA (UK)
Z. Berkay Celik, Purdue University (US)
Luis Garcia, University of Utah (US)
Joe Gardiner, University of Bristol (UK)
Rajvir Kaur, NIT Puducherry (IN)
Charalambos Konstantinou, KAUST (SA)
Ajit Kumar, Soongsil University (KR)
Pradeep Kumar, Swansea University (UK)
Daisuke Mashima, Illinois Advanced Research Center (SG)
Aryan Pasikhani, Sheffield University (UK)
Gauthama Raman, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SG)
Sangram Ray, NIT Sikkim (IN)
Giedre Sabaliauskaite, Swansea University (UK)
Vishal Sharma, Queen’s University Belfast (UK)
Mayank Swarnkar, IIT BHU (IN)
Nikhil Tripathi, IIIT Sri City (IN)
Sarad Venugopalan, University of Bristol (UK)
Rohit Verma, National College of Ireland (IE)