From 14 to 16 August 2023, iCSS hosted two co-located international conferences, NSS 2023 (17th International Conference on Network and System Security) and SocialSec 2023 (9th International Symposium on Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data), in the Grimond Building on the main campus of the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK.
The joint event saw 35 presentations about research work of authors from 18 different countries. The presentations cover a wide range of cyber security topics such as network security, system security, AI and security, applied cryptography, blockchain, mis- and disinformation, social media analytics, privacy, malware, and hardware security. Slides of all presentations can be downloaded from the conferences’ website at https://nss-socialsec2023.cyber.kent.ac.uk/program.php.
Three established cyber security researchers gave their keynote talks at the event. The first keynote talk on “The Future of Passwords” was delivered by Dr Julia Hesse from the IBM Research Zurich in Switzerland. The talk was chaired by the NSS 2023 PC Co-Chair Professor Atsuko Miyaji from the Osaka University and Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) in Japan. The talk’s slides can be downloaded from here.
The second keynote talk on “Monitoring & Mitigating Online Harms: Is Redecentralisation the Answer to Partisanship, Hate Speech, Tracking etc.?” was given by Professor Nishanth Sastry from the University of Surrey in the UK. The talk was chaired by the SocialSec 2023 PC Co-Chair and the joint event’s General Co-Chair Dr Budi Arief from iCSS. The talk’s slides can be downloaded from here.
The final keynote talk on “Trustworthy AI… for Systems Security” was delivered by Professor Lorenzo Cavallaro from the University College London (UCL) in the UK. The talk was chaired by the NSS 2023 PC Co-Chair and the joint event’s Publication Chair Professor Shujun Li from iCSS. The talk’s slides can be downloaded from here.
NSS 2023 and SocialSec 2023 PC Co-Chairs selected four papers to receive an award and iCSS sponsored a cash prize for each award. The four award-winning papers and their authors are:
- NSS 2023 Best Paper Award: “Modular Polynomial Multiplication Using RSA/ECC coprocessor”, authored by Aurélien Greuet, Simon Montoya and Clémence Vermeersch from the Cryptography and Security Labs of IDEMIA in France
- SocialSec 2023 Best Paper Award: “People Still Care About Facts: Twitter Users Engage More with Factual Discourse than Misinformation”, authored by Luiz Giovanini, Shlok Gilda, Mirela Silva, Fabrício Ceschin, Prakash Shrestha, Christopher Brant, Juliana Fernandes, Catia Silva, André Grégio and Daniela Oliveira from the University of Florida in the USA and Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba in Brazil
- NSS 2023 Best Student Paper Award: “Security Analysis of Mobile Point-of-Sale Terminals”, authored by Mahshid Mehr Nezhad, Elliot Laidlaw and Feng Hao from the University of Warwick in the UK
- SocialSec 2023 Best Student Paper Award: “The Impact of Synthetic Data on Membership Inference Attacks”, authored by Md Sakib Nizam Khan and Sonja Buchegger from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden
The awards were announced at the conference banquet in the evening of 15th August, inside the Canterbury Cathedral Lodge. Before the conference dinner, participants enjoyed the old city of Canterbury in a guided tour, and had a pre-dinner drink on the lawn of the Canterbury Cathedral Lodge, which is on the beautiful ground of the Canterbury Cathedral, part of a UNESCO World Heritage site at the heart of the old city of Canterbury.
The joint event was accompanied by a stand of Springer, the scientific publisher with which the two co-located conferences’ proceedings are published. At the end of the event, Springer donated 30+ displayed books to iCSS. The Springer books, together with a copy of a recently published book co-authored by a conference participant (Dr Niyati Baliyan from the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra in India), were distributed to the conferences’ participants towards the end of the event using random numbers generated by ChatGPT. The conferences ended with a short presentation of the next year’s edition of NSS and SocialSec, to be held in the UAE.
Another social activity of the joint event was the Welcome Reception on the first day (14th August). Together with the other social activities (conference banquet, the pre-banquet drink, the guided city tour, lunch sessions and breaks), the Welcome Reception allowed participants to network more casually to learn from each other’s research work and life beyond the academic world.
More about the joint event including a full list of its organisers can be found at its website. The conference proceedings can be found online at Springer’s website here (NSS 2023 proceedings) and here (SocialSec 2023 proceedings).
We thank all participants for coming to the conferences and we look forward to meeting with them again at the University of Kent and/or elsewhere in the future!