Workshop on Security Predictions

to be held on Friday, February 5, 2010 in Pisa, in connection with ESSoS 2010.

Today, meteorologists make forecasts of the global climate fifty to a hundred years from now. They can do this because they have climate models that allow the extrapolation of current climate data into the future.  We believe it is time that these capabilities also came to the field of Computer Security, in order to turn that field into a science.  If we can find good prediction models, this could significantly and permanently reshape the security landscape.

We are interested in the "security climate" in many dimensions:

* Large-scale attack trends
* Vulnerable software (source code, packages, operating systems, open source vs. closed source, etc.)
* Security usability
* Economics of security
* Attacker milieux (operators of botnets etc)

The workshop will have two main axes: data sets and prediction models.  The "data sets" track would report on large-scale data sets and the trends and inferences that can be inferred from them. The "prediction models" track would focus on ideas on how to get good prediction models out of these data.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, would be twofold: first, you give a 30-minute talk about your work (20 minutes talk, 10 minutes discussions), or ideas that are relevant to the topic, and second, you participate in the (hopefully lively) discussions that ensue.

Important dates: This is an invitation-only workshop. There is no deadline and there are no proceedings.

Organisation: The organisers will collect the presentations and will also try to write coherent minutes. These will then be published on a web site.

Contact: Contact Stephan.Neuhaus [at] disi.unitn.it if you're interested in participating.

Cost: Between 80 and 90 €, including one lunch and two coffee breaks. 
(The price is not yet fixed.)

Provisional attendee list:

Barbara Carminati, Università degli Studi dell'Insubria Marc Dacier, Eurecom Hervé Debar, Orange/France Telecom Stefan Frei, ETH Zürich Shailendra Fuloria, University Cambridge Jonas Hallberg, FOI, Sweden Amund Hunstad, FOI, Sweden Christophe Huygens, KU Leuven Piotr Kijewski, CERT.pl Jean-Claude Laprie, LAAS, France Bernhard Plattner, ETH Zürich Stuart Schechter, Microsoft Reseach Ben Smith, North Carolina State University Sebastien Tricaud, Honeynet Geraldine Vache, LAAS, France