[TYPES/announce] (Deadline extended to Jan 25th, 2020) LangSec 2020, San Francisco, USA

[Gang (Gary) Tan]

Due to requests, we are extending the LangSec 2020 deadline to Jan
25th, 2020.

Call for Papers
Sixth Workshop on Language-Theoretic Security (LangSec)
Affiliated with 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland)
May 21st, 2020, San Francisco, CA

The Language-Theoretic Security (LangSec) workshop solicits
contributions of research papers, work-in-progress reports, and panels
related to the growing area of language--theoretic security.

Submission Guidelines: see http://spw20.langsec.org/cfp.pdf

Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=langsec2020

Important Dates:
Research paper submissions due: January 25, 2020, AOE
Work-in-progress reports and panels submissions due:
   February 1, 2020, AOE
Notification to authors: February 22, 2020
Camera ready: March 6, 2020

Topics: LangSec posits that the only path to trustworthy computer
software that takes untrusted inputs is treating all valid or expected
inputs as a formal language, and the respective input-handling routine
as a parser for that language. The parsing must be feasible, and the
parser must match the language in required computation power and
convert the input for the consumption of subsequent computation. The
6th installation of the workshop will focus on methodologies (1) that
can infer formal language specifications from samples of electronic
data, (2) that can generate secure parsers from formal specifications
of electronic data, and (3) that describe the complexity hierarchy of
verifying parser implementations. The following is an non-exhaustive
list of topics that are of relevance to LangSec:

* formalization of vulnerabilities and exploits in terms of language
   theory
* inference of formal language specifications of data from samples
* generation of secure parsers from formal language specifications
* complexity hierarchy of verifying parser implementations
* science of protocol design: layering, fragmentation and re-assembly,
   extensibility, etc.
* architectural constructs for enforcing limits on computational
   complexity
* empirical data on programming language features/programming styles
   that affect bug introduction rates (e.g., syntactic redundancy)
* systems architectures and designs based on LangSec principles
* computer languages, file formats, and network protocols built on
   LangSec principles
* re-engineering efforts of existing languages, formats, and protocols
   to reduce computational power

Chairs
PC co-chair: Gang Tan (Pennsylvania State University)
PC co-chair: Sergey Bratus (Dartmouth College)

Contact:
All questions about submissions should be emailed to the PC chairs:
Gang Tan (gtan at psu.edu) and Sergey Bratus (sergey at cs.dartmouth.edu)

-- 

Gang (Gary) Tan
Associate Professor
Penn State CSE and ICS
W358 Westgate Building
http://www.cse.psu.edu/~gxt29
Tel:814-8657364