2024 IEEE CSR Workshop on Cyber Forensics and Advanced Threat Investigations in Emerging Technologies (CFATI)

 Call for Papers

The increasing proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICT) in our lives, has facilitated connectivity growth between distinct parts of our world. Various types of data are continuously streaming across many boundaries in the world with different models, policies, and purposes. Additionally, this data is usually analyzed or stored on edge or gateway devices, which have highly limited capabilities and are vulnerable to sophisticated attacks. With the growth of connectivity between various heterogeneous systems, numerous attack vectors are constantly evolving, that can potentially be exploited for malicious or criminal purposes (e.g. data breaches, identity theft, stealing of intellectual property and trade secrets, etc.). Recent cyberattacks dangerously target a broad array of computing systems, varying from data centers and personal machines to mobile devices and industrial control systems.

There is a growing need for new methodologies, tools, and techniques, capable of extracting, preserving, and analyzing different evidence trails in various networked systems and services such as routers, firewalls, web proxies, and network monitoring tools. Additionally, there is also a growing need for research into new systems that are capable of analyzing network traffic, netflows, and systems logs. Satisfying these demands will aid in reconstructing the timeline of the cyber-crime/attack under investigation and, possibly, the identification of the potential actor(s).

Cyber forensics and threat investigations have rapidly emerged as a new field of research to provide the key elements for maintaining security, reliability, and trustworthiness of the next generation of emerging technologies such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, cloud/edge/fog computing, software-defined networks, and network function virtualization. Complicated efforts are required in suitable and timely manners against any threats detected within these systems. Moreover, new frameworks are required to collect and preserve potential evidential data in suitable and timely manners as well. To guarantee proper cyber-defenses and strategies against the expanding landscape of criminal activities as well as rapidly advancing emerging technologies. 

The main motivation for this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners working on cyber forensics and threat investigations for emerging technologies to disseminate current research issues and advances. Original technical papers describing new, state-of-the-art research, will be considered. The workshop welcomes submissions that evaluate existing research results by reproducing experiments. The aim of this workshop is to provide insight for the discussion of the major research challenges and achievements on various topics of interest.

Papers on practical as well as theoretical topics and problems in various topics related to cyber forensics and threat investigations are invited, with special emphasis on novel techniques and tools to collect data from networked devices and services in emerging networks (such as the ones that can be found in cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things). 

Topics of Interest

Prospective authors are encouraged to submit previously unpublished contributions from a broad range of topics, which include but are not limited to the following:

› Forensics and threat investigations in P2P, cloud/edge, SDN/NFV, VPN, social nets
› Forensics and threat investigations in IoT, smart tech. (car, home, city), e/m-health
› Forensics and visualization of big data
› Tools and services for cyber forensics and threat investigations
› Attack detection, traceback, attribution in emerging technologies
› Malware analysis and attribution
› Methods for reconstruction of digital evidence in emerging technologies

› Security and privacy in P2P, cloud/edge, SDN/NFV, VPN, social nets
› Security and privacy in IoT, smart tech. (car, home, city)
› Open source intelligence (OSINT)
› Dark web Investigations
› Digital evidence extraction/analysis using AI/ML and data mining
› Data exfiltration from networked devices/services (e.g. cyber-physical systems, IoT)
› Large-scale investigations and ML for the analysis of intelligence data sets and logs

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: June 3, 2024 AoE
Authors’ notification: July 3,  2024 AoE
Camera-ready submission: July 14, 2024 AoE
Early registration deadline: July 20, 2024 AoE
Workshop date: September 2-4, 2024

Submission Guidelines

The workshop’s proceedings will be published by IEEE and will be included in IEEE Xplore. The guidelines for authors, manuscript preparation guidelines, and policies of the IEEE CSR conference are applicable to CFATI 2024 workshop. Please visit the authors’ instructions page for more details. When submitting your manuscript via the conference management system, please make sure that the workshop’s track 2T2 CFATI is selected in the Topic Areas drop down list.

Workshop Committees

Workshop chairs

Chris Lane, London Metropolitan University (UK)
Preeti Patel, London Metropolitan University (UK)
Ahmed Elmesiry, London Metropolitan University (UK)

Publicity chair

Mona Abdelgayed, London Metropolitan University (UK)

Contact us

c.lane@londonmet.ac.uk
p.patel@londonmet.ac.uk
a.elmesiry@londonmet.ac.uk

Technical Program Committee

Kanaka Durga Amaravathi, Osmania University (IN)
Mehdi Gheisari, Islamic Azad University (IR)
Michael Spranger, University of Applied Sciences Mittweida (DE)
Hafiz Malik, University of Michigan – Dearborn (US)
Gabriella Marcelja, SG Impact Ventures AG (CH)
Ahmed Elmesiry, London Metropolitan University (UK)
Sharwari Solapure Sangli, Walchand College of Engineering (IN)
Yugal Pathak, Esec Forte Technologies (IN)