Aim and Scope

Cyberspace has been reshaped as an integration of businesses, governments and individuals, such as e-business, communication and social life. At the same time, it has also been providing convenient platforms for crimes, such as financial fraud, information phishing, distributed denial of service attacks, and fake message propagation. Especially, the emergence of social networks has raised significant security and privacy issues to the public. We have seen news of various network related security attacks from time to time, and defenders are usually vulnerable to detect, mitigate and traceback to the source of attacks. It is a new research challenge of fighting against criminals in the cyber space. The potential solutions involve various disciplines, such as networking, watermarking, information theory, game theory, mathematical and statistical modelling, data mining, artificial intelligence, multimedia processing, neural network, pattern recognition, cryptography and forensic criminology, etc.

The challenges still remain in the fields of network security and privacy. We have witnessed ever increasing new attack strategies, such as from brute force DDoS attacks to low-rate DDoS attacks, from IP fluxing to domain fluxing for botnets. As long as a new detection method is employed, a new strategy will be pursued to convict it by the attackers. Once a vulnerable package is patched, attackers will always try hard to find another vulnerable point to continue their attacks. The battle between defenders and attackers is an endless loop.

In addition, network forensics is an emerging topic for network security communities. There are many research challenges in this brand new field. For example, is a given image in the cyberspace a genuine one? how to identify anomaly information from the tremendous network traffic, especially when cyber criminals disguise their traces, and even mimic legitimate behavior to fly under the radar; how to trace back to the people who commit network attacks when the current trace back methods can only reach zombies, rather than the human master head; how to deal with the network forensic constraints enforced by the law when most of advanced forensic techniques are not necessarily feasible in practice because of possible contamination in terms of computer crime laws.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Anonymous system and forensics
  • IP traceback
  • Malware detection
  • Botnet identification
  • Networked video system
  • Biometric security and forensics
  • Emotion identification via video
  • Wireless network security
  • Game theory for network security
  • Data Mining for network security
  • DDoS attacks
  • Virus source traceback
  • Malware source traceback
  • Botmaster traceback
  • Distributed systems and forensics
  • System security and forensics
  • Intrusion detection
  • Wireless network privacy
  • Information theory for network security
  • Multimedia network security