iCSS hosts the 24th International Conference on Information and Communications Security (ICICS 2022)

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This year, iCSS hosted the 24th International Conference on Information and Communications Security (ICICS 2022) at the main campus of the University of Kent, in Canterbury, Kent, UK. The conference took place over four days, from 5 to 8 September, and hosted a number of presentations and demonstrations, both in-person and online.

The first keynote of the conference, ‘Future Challenges in Security Engineering’, was presented by ProfessorRoss Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at University of Cambridge and University of Edinburgh, UK. In this talk, Professor Anderson discussed how the right to software updates for goods with digital elements will affect durable safety-critical goods with software and network connections, like cars and medical devices. If a customer expects software updates for a reasonable time period after purchase, how will teams support security patches and safety for 10+ years, for example? This challenge becomes more complex when taking into account machine learning components, as well as associated costs and practical design limits.
Our second keynote, ‘Underspecified Foundation Models Considered Harmful’, was delivered by Dr NicholasCarlini, a research scientist at Google Brain. Dr Carliniargued that, while neural networks are commonly trained to behave as a “foundation” for future models, this comes at a cost to their security. Although this method may benefit accuracy, unlabelled datasets could, for example, be “poisoned” to perform various attacks. To address these challenges, new categories of defences would be required, that can simultaneously allow models to train on large datasets while also being robust to adversarial training data.
The third keynote, ‘Toward Practical Privacy Protections for Blockchain Networks’, was presented by Dr Guang Gong, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Waterloo, Canada. In this talk, Dr Gong examined the current research in permissionless and permissioned blockchain systems and their potential for applications where value or data is transferred, stored and processed. Dr Gong also provided an example of Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk–SNARK) schemes.

In addition to the three keynotes, at the Conference there were a total of 11 technical sessions, each of which included 3-4 papers. Visit our website for more information on the programme, or watch the recorded presentations on YouTube.

This year’s event also saw winners of six awards:

• Best Paper Award: “Maliciously Secure Multi-Party PSI with Lower Bandwidth and Faster Computation,” authored by Zhi Qiu, Kang Yang, Yu Yu and LijingZhou.
• Best Student Paper: “Lightweight and Practical Privacy-Preserving Image Masking in Smart Community,” authored by Zhen Liu, Yining Liu and WeizhiMeng.
• Best Presentation Award: “Privacy-aware Split Learning Based Energy Theft Detection for Smart Grids,” authored by Arwa Alromih, John A. Clark and Prosanta Gope, presented by Arwa Alromih.
• Best Artifact Award: “DeepC2: AI-powered Covert Command and Control on OSNs,” authored by Zhi Wang, Chaoge Liu, Xiang Cui, Jie Yin, Jiaxi Liu, Di Wu and Qixu Liu, demonstrated by Zhi Wang.
• Best Poster Award: “Image-based Neural Network Models for Malware Traffic Classification using PCAP to Picture Conversion,” (Paper) authored by Georgios Agrafiotis, Eftychia Makri, Ioannis Flionis, Antonios Lalas, Konstantinos Votis, Dimitrios Tzovaras and Nikolaos Tsampieris, presented by Georgios Agrafiotis and Nikolaos Tsampieris.
• Best Demo Award: “VEREFOO: an automated framework for virtual firewall configuration,” (Paper 1, Paper 2), authored by Daniele Bringhenti, Guido Marchetto, Riccardo Sisto and Fulvio Valenza, presented by Daniele Bringhenti.

Congratulations to all of the award winners!

iCSS were delighted to welcome so many visitors to Kent and thank the authors, the presenters and everyone who helped to organise and run the day.