2026 IEEE CSR Workshop on Generative and eXplainable AI for Security in Networking (GenXSec)

 Call for Papers

Recent advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), are opening new opportunities to enhance the security, resilience, and trustworthiness of modern networks. While GenAI has shown significant impact across multiple domains, its adoption in cybersecurity and resilient network operations is still largely exploratory. Modern networks face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, including intrusions, large-scale distributed attacks, and zero day exploits, which traditional security mechanisms and AI approaches often struggle to address. In this context, GenAI enables advanced modeling of benign and malicious network behavior, the generation of realistic attack and traffic patterns, and the automation of security analysis and response, supporting proactive and adaptive cyber defense strategies. However, the growing reliance on AI-based security solutions raises critical challenges related to robustness, reliability, transparency, and resilience to adversarial manipulation. Many models function as black boxes, limiting their use in mission-critical and regulated environments where trust, accountability, and explainability are essential. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) plays a key role in addressing these challenges by making AI-driven security decisions interpretable, supporting human analysts in threat understanding and response, and facilitating compliance with regulatory and ethical requirements. XAI also contributes to assessing and improving the resilience of AI-enabled security mechanisms by helping identify failure modes and vulnerabilities under dynamic network conditions. The proposed workshop complements the scope of IEEE CSR by focusing on the intersection of GenAI, XAI, and network security and resilience. While IEEE CSR addresses cybersecurity and resilience broadly, this workshop provides a focused forum on generative and explainable AI as enablers of trustworthy, resilient networks, fostering cross-disciplinary discussion and showcasing practical AI-driven solutions.

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Prospective authors are encouraged to submit previously unpublished contributions from a broad range of topics, which include but are not limited to the following:

› Generative AI for network traffic modeling, synthesis, and cyber threat simulation
› GenAI-based network traffic analysis for intrusion and anomaly detection
› Explainable GenAI for real-time network traffic monitoring and security decision support
› Generative approaches for traffic-based attack detection, prediction, and forecasting
› XAI techniques for interpretable network traffic classification and security analytics
› GenAI-driven automation for traffic-aware and resilient network security management

› Generative AI for security log and flow data correlation in networked systems
› Robustness and resilience of traffic-based GenAI security models under adversarial conditions
› Explainable AI for traffic-level cyber resilience, fault diagnosis, and incident response
› Human-in-the-loop security systems for network traffic analysis and threat mitigation
› Privacy-preserving GenAI for secure network traffic analysis
› Trust, accountability, and transparency in AI-driven network traffic security

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: April 13, 2026
Authors’ notification: May 4, 2026
Camera-ready submission: May 25, 2026
Registration deadline (authors): May 25, 2026
Workshop dates: August 3–5, 2026

Submission Guidelines

Submitted manuscripts should not exceed 6 pages (plus 2 extra pages, being subject to overlength page charges) and should be of sufficient detail to be evaluated by expert reviewers in the field. The workshop’s proceedings will be published by IEEE and will be included in IEEE Xplore subject to meeting IEEE Xplore’s scope and quality requirements.

The guidelines for authors, manuscript preparation guidelines, and policies of the IEEE CSR conference are applicable to GenXSec 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 2T8 GenXSec is selected in the Topic Areas drop down list.

Workshop Committees

Workshop Chairs

Contact Us

alfredo.nascita@unina.it
francesco.cerasuolo@unina.it
giampaolo.bovenzi@unina.it
pescape@unina.it

Technical Program Committee

Tran Anh Quang Pham, Huawei Technolgies (FR)
Danilo Giordano, Politecnico di Torino (IT)
Jonatan Krolikowski, Huawei Technolgies (FR)
Jan Luxemburk, Czech Technical University, CESNET (CZ)
Claudio Fiandrino, IMDEA Networks Institute (ES)
Tomáš Čejka, Czech Technical University, CESNET (CZ)
Haiming Chen, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
Flavio Esposito, Saint Louis University (US)
Marilia Curado, University of Coimbra (PT)
Walter Cerroni, Università di Bologna (IT)
Maria Solange Pires Ferreira Rito Lima, Universidade do Minho (PT)
Giancarlo Sperlì, University of Naples Federico II (IT)
Catalin Meirosu, Ericsson (US)
Carlos Becker Westphall, University St-Etienne (FR)
Anat Bremler-Barr, Tel-Aviv University (IL)
Abbas Bradai, University of Cote d’Azur (FR)

Program Information