Symposium Topics

LISA: Where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.

The LISA conference has long served as the annual vendor-neutral meeting place for the wider system administration community. The LISA14 program recognized the overlap and differences between traditional and modern IT operations and engineering, and developed a highly-curated program around 5 key topics: Systems Engineering, Security, Culture, DevOps, and Monitoring/Metrics. The program included 22 half- and full-day training sessions; 10 workshops; and a conference program consisting of 50 invited talks, panels, refereed paper presentations, and mini-tutorials.

Refereed paper submissions are solicited in all areas relating to systems research in security and privacy, including but not limited to:

  • System security
    • Operating systems security
    • Web security
    • Mobile systems security
    • Distributed systems security
    • Cloud computing security
  • Network security
    • Intrusion and anomaly detection and prevention
    • Network infrastructure security
    • Denial-of-service attacks and countermeasures
    • Wireless security
  • Cryptographic implementation analysis and construction
  • Applied cryptography
  • Security analysis
    • Malware analysis
    • Analysis of network and security protocols
    • Attacks with novel insights, techniques, or results
    • Forensics and diagnostics for security
    • Automated security analysis of hardware designs and implementation
    • Automated security analysis of source code and binaries
    • Program analysis
  • Security measurement studies
    • Measurements of fraud, malware, spam
    • Measurements of human behavior and security
  • Privacy-enhancing technologies and anonymity
  • Usable security and privacy
  • Language-based security
  • Hardware security
    • Secure computer architectures
    • Embedded systems security
    • Methods for detection of malicious or counterfeit hardware
    • Side channels
  • Research on surveillance and censorship
  • Social issues and security
    • Research on computer security law and policy
    • Ethics of computer security research
    • Research on security education and training

This topic list is not meant to be exhaustive; USENIX Security is interested in all aspects of computing systems security and privacy. Papers without a clear application to security or privacy, however, will be considered out of scope and may be rejected without full review.

Given the rapidly expanding and maturing security and privacy community, we hope to increase the acceptance rate of papers that are more "far-reaching" and "risky," as long as those papers also show sufficient promise for creating interesting discussions and questioning widely-held beliefs.

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