Call for Papers

The static nature of current computing systems has made them easy to attack and hard to defend.  Adversaries have an asymmetric advantage in that they have the time to study a system, identify its vulnerabilities, and choose the time and place of attack to gain the maximum benefit.  The idea of moving-target defense (MTD) is to impose the same asymmetric disadvantage on attackers by making systems random, diverse, and dynamic and therefore harder to explore and predict.  With a constantly changing system and its ever-adapting attack surface, attackers will have to deal with significant uncertainty just like defenders do today.  The ultimate goal of MTD is to increase the attackers’ workload so as to level the cybersecurity playing field for defenders and attackers – ultimately tilting it in favor of the defender.

The workshop seeks to bring together researchers from academia, government, and industry to report on the latest research efforts on moving-target defense, and to have productive discussion and constructive debate on this topic.  We solicit submissions on original research in the broad area of MTD, with possible topics such as those listed below.  As MTD research is still in its infancy, the list should only be used as a reference.  We welcome all contributions that fall under the broad scope of moving target defense, including research that shows negative results.

• System randomization
• Artificial diversity
• Cyber maneuver and agility
• Software diversity
• Dynamic network configuration
• Moving target in the cloud
• System diversification techniques
• Dynamic compilation techniques
• Adaptive/proactive defenses
• Intelligent countermeasure selection
• MTD strategies and planning
• Deep learning for MTD
• MTD quantification methods and models
• MTD evaluation and assessment frameworks
• Large-scale MTD (using multiple techniques)
• Moving target in software coding, application API virtualization
• Autonomous technologies for MTD
• Theoretic study on modeling trade-offs of using MTD approaches
• Human, social, and usability aspects of MTD
• AI, machine learning, and data analytics related MTD
• Other related areas

Submissions

Submitted papers must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings.  Submissions should be at most 10 pages in the ACM double-column format, excluding well-marked appendices, and at most 12 pages in total.  Submissions are not required to be anonymized.

Submissions are to be made to the submission web site at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mtd2020.  Only PDF files will be accepted.  Submissions not meeting these guidelines risk rejection without consideration of their merits.  Papers must be received by the deadline of June 21, 2020 to be considered.  Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent to authors by August 8, 2020.  Camera ready papers must be submitted by September 2, 2020.  Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that one of the authors will register and present the paper at the workshop.  Proceedings of the workshop will be available on a CD to the workshop attendees and will become part of the ACM Digital Library.

Important Dates

• Paper submission due: June 21, 2020 July 19, 2020
• Notification to authors: August 8, 2020 August 10, 2020
• Camera ready due: September 6, 2020 (No Extensions)

Keynote Speakers

Prof. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Professor of Computer Science at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany

Title: “Long Live Randomization: On Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing in Pandemic”

Prof. Trent Jaeger, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University, USA

Title: “Static Analysis Opportunities for Improving Agile and Moving Target Defenses”

Program Chairs

• Hamed Okhravi, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, USA
• Cliff Wang, Army Research Office, USA

Steering Commitee

• Sushil Jajodia, Chair, George Mason University, USA
• Dijiang Huang, Arizona State University, USA
• Hamed Okhravi, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, USA
• Xinming Ou, University of South Florida, USA
• Kun Sun, George Mason University, USA

Program Commitee

• Massimiliano Albanese, George Mason University, USA
• Alex  Bardas, University of Kansas, USA
• Hasan Cam, US Army Research Lab, USA
• Valentina  Casola, University of Naples Federico II, Italy
• Joel Coffman, US Air Force Academy, USA
• George Cybenko, Dartmouth College, USA
• Michael Franz, UC Irvine, USA
• Dijiang Huang, Arizona State University, USA
• Dong Seong Kim, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
• Jason Li, Seige Technology, USA
• Peng Liu, Penn State University, USA
• Zhuo Lu, University of South Florida, USA
• Sandeep Pisharody, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, USA
• Kun Sun, George Mason University, USA
• Vipin Swarup, MITRE Corporation, USA
• Shouhuai Xu, University of Texas at San Antonio, USA
• Minghui Zhu, Penn State University, USA

Program

The complete proceedings of the workshop can be found here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3411496

All times are in U.S. Eastern Standard Time (UTC -5:00).

Welcome Remarks	Hamed Okhravi and Cliff	10:00am – 10:10am
Keynote 1 Session Chair: Hamed Okhravi	Long Live Randomization: On Privacy-preserving Contact Tracing in Pandemic Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi(Paper by Thien Duc Nguyen, Markus Miettinen, and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi)	10:10am – 11:10am
Break		11:10am – 11:45am
Session 1: New Techniques and Models, and Evaluation Session Chair: Hamed Okhravi	Dynamic Address Validation Array (DAVA): A MovingTarget Defense Protocol for CANBus Susmit Shannigrahi, Chris Jenkins, Richard Brown, and Alex Marti	11:45am – 12:10pm
	Moving Target Defense Decision-Making Method: A Dynamic Markov Differential Game Model Hengwei Zhang, Jinglei Tan, Xiaohu Liu, and Jindong Wang	12:10pm – 12:35pm
	OpenMTD: A Framework for Efficient Network-Level MTD Evaluation Richard Poschinger, Nils Rodday, Raphael Labaca-Castro, and Gabi Dreo Rodosek	12:35pm – 1:00pm
Break		1:00pm – 2:00pm
Keynote 2 Session Chair: Cliff Wang	Static Analysis Opportunities for Improving Agile and Moving Target Defenses Trent Jaeger	2:00pm – 3:00pm
Session 2: Systematization of MTD 1 Session Chair: Cliff Wang	Adoption Challenges of Code Randomization   Per Larsen and Michael Franz	3:00pm – 3:25pm
	Lessons Learned in Network and Memory-Based Moving Target Defenses Richard Skowyra and Samuel Jero	3:25pm – 3:50pm
Break		3:50pm – 4:10pm
Session 3: Systematization of MTD 2 Session Chair: Cliff Wang​	Range and Topology Mutation Based Wireless Agility Qi Duan, Ehab Al-Shaer, and Linda Xie	4:10pm – 4:35pm
	The Cybersecurity Dynamics Way of Thinking and Landscape Shouhuai Xu	4:35pm – 5:00pm
	Moving Target Defense Considerations in Real-Time Safety- and Mission-Critical Systems Nathan Burow, Ryan Burrow, Roger Khazan, Howard Shrobe, and Bryan Ward	5:00pm – 5:25pm
Closing Remarks Session Chair: Cliff Wang​	Hamed Okhravi and Cliff Wang	5:25pm – 5:30pm