Solicited papers

C&ESAR solicits submissions on any subject related to cybersecurity. The scope covers:

• all lifecycle steps and activities, from system requirement elicitation to disposal/retirement of equipment and systems, including for example law and regulation, DevSecOps loops, operational cyber defense, penetration testing, or misinformation;
• all types of products or context, including for example networks, embedded systems, industrial systems, personal devices, IoT, cloud or edge computing.

C&ESAR solicits the following types of papers:

• Regular paper: 10 to 16 pages paper describing work by the authors not yet published;
• Short paper: 5 to 9 pages paper describing work by the authors not yet published;
• Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) paper: 10 to 16 pages paper that “evaluate, systematize, and contextualize existing knowledge” (a description of SoK papers can be found at https://www.jsys.org/type_SoK/; examples of SoK papers can be found at https://oaklandsok.github.io/);
• Replication paper: 5 to 16 pages paper replicating, questioning and clarifying important work done by others and already published;
• Extended abstract: 2 to 16 pages abstract of a large audience didactic paper recently published (by the same authors or a superset of them) in a peer-reviewed journal or conference proceedings (papers of interest include in particular: states of the art or practice, surveys, experience reports, and directly applicable solutions to common problems).
• Practice paper (practice paper): 2 to 16 pages didactic paper related to cybersecurity practice of special interest for C&ESAR’s audience (the scope covers any topic from engineering work to legal issues, and social or geopolitical studies).

Submission process

Steps

C&ESAR follows a 3 steps submission process (abstract, proposal, final version). Evaluation and selection is done on the proposal and final version steps. During the proposal step, a selective evaluation is done with a low selection rate on a detailed outline of the proposed article (or directly on the final version if a final version is submitted as proposal). During the final version step, an evaluation with a high selection rate (high number of articles selected) is done on the final version of the accepted proposals.

• First step (abstract): title, authors and abstract of the proposals have to be registered no later than Wednesday, May 22, 2024 on EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cesar2024.
• Second step (proposal): proposals (2 to 6 pages for all types of papers, optionally up to 16 pages) have to be submitted as a PDF file no later than Wednesday, May 22, 2024 via EasyChair. Authors will be notified of their proposal preselection by Wednesday, June 26, 2024 (a final selection will be made on the final version).
  • Regular paper: If desired, authors can already submit a complete paper of up to 16 pages. However, reviewers will not be required to invest more efforts at this stage than they would for a 6 pages proposal.
  • Short paper: If desired, authors can already submit a complete paper of up to 9 pages. However, reviewers will not be required to invest more efforts at this stage than they would for a 6 pages proposal.
  • SoK paper: Must be explicitly identified as such by the mention “(SoK)” in their title. If desired, authors can already submit a complete paper of up to 16 pages. However, reviewers will not be required to invest more efforts at this stage than they would for a 6 pages proposal.
  • Replication paper: Must be explicitly identified as such by the mention “(replication)” in their title; and explicitly identify and cite the original work replicated. If desired, authors can already submit a complete paper of up to 16 pages. However, reviewers will not be required to invest more efforts at this stage than they would for a 6 pages proposal.
  • Extended abstract: Must be explicitly identified as such by the mention “(extended abstract)” in their title; explicitly identify and cite the original publication; and, contain an appendix containing the (anonymized) comments made by the reviewers of the original publication. If desired, at this stage, authors can submit the PDF of the original article(s) instead of the PDF of a summary. However, reviewers will not be required to invest more efforts at this stage than they would for a 6 pages summary.
  • Practice paper: Must be explicitly identified as such by the mention “(practice)” in their title. If desired, authors can already submit a complete paper of up to 16 pages. However, reviewers will not be required to invest more efforts at this stage than they would for a 6 pages proposal.
• Third step (final version): authors of preselected papers have to upload the final version of their paper on EasyChair by Wednesday, August 28, 2024. Authors of preselected papers commit to address reviewers’ comments in this final version. A final selection with a really high selection rate is performed at this stage.

Language and selection criteria

Language

Papers are written in French or in English (English translations of title and abstract of papers written in French must be provided).

Audience

C&ESAR is aimed at the following audience of decision makers, practitioners and researchers:

• Decision makers interested in:
  • broad and well constructed overview of a problematic and its solutions;
• “technology scouts” of operational units interested in:
  • knowing more about the state of practice (what others in the same domain do),
  • identifying recent mature technologies that may help solving some of their operational problems;
• Engineers and researchers of innovation units interested in:
  • knowing more about the state of the art in their specialty,
  • knowing more about the operational problems addressed by others in their community,
  • identifying recent to be matured technologies that may help solving some of their operational problems;
• Engineers and researchers of research units interested in:
  • knowing more about the state of the art in specialties related to their own,
  • identifying operational problems related to their research specialties

Selection criteria

For all types of papers, selection criteria include in particular: fitness for the audience; clarity; pedagogical (didactical) value; and respect of this call for papers topic and guidelines.

For regular papers and short papers, the work described must be unpublished and innovative. Highly specialized technical papers will be appreciated if they contribute to explain and analyze the state of the art or practice and their deficiencies.

For SoK papers, the report of the state of the scientific and industrial literature on the topic addressed must be quite thorough, and a synthesis must accompany this analysis.

For replication papers, the work replicated must be clearly identified and cited. They must bring added value compared to the publications of the original work replicated. This added value can take many different forms, such as: at the clarity level, by providing a better explanation of the work; at the pedagogical level, by providing additional explanations facilitating the replication; at the scientific level, by exploring the limitations of the original work, or by replicating it in a different setting.

For extended abstracts, the original publication must be clearly identified and cited. Moreover, the selection process is more selective, and emphasizes the didactical quality and large audience of the papers.

For practice papers, the work described must be of special interest for the intended audience of C&ESAR. The selection process emphasizes the didactical quality and large audience of the papers.

Instructions for the format of proposals and papers

Proposals and papers must be submitted as PDF files, without page numbering, following the single column format of “CEUR Workshop Proceedings” in “emphasizing capitalized style” (https://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html#PREPARE).

Templates are available for LaTeX, docx (Word) and ODT (Word or LibreOffice) at the following URL: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/CEURART.zip.

A TeX template configured for C&ESAR 2024 is available on Overleaf at https://www.overleaf.com/read/gryhfckqxmxn#34971a (it must be duplicated before edition). A PDF example is available at https://2024.cesar-conference.org/resources/CESAR-2024_template-example.pdf. Submissions not looking like this example will not be considered for inclusion in the official proceedings.

Proceedings

Authors can opt out of inclusion in any form of proceedings.

As far as possible (and since 2021), the official conference proceedings are submitted for publication to “CEUR Workshop Proceedings” (http://ceur-ws.org), and efforts are performed in order to facilitate indexing of articles in DBLP and Google Scholar. This publication is conditioned by the respect of this publisher’s constraints (http://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html) and acceptance criteria, in particular respect of its paper format and having a majority of high quality articles written in English.

In order to increase the probablity of acceptance by the publisher and indexing by publication databases such as DBLP, only a curated list of the most qualitative papers form the official conference proceedings are submitted for publication as a volume of “CEUR Workshop Proceedings”. The official proceedings inclusion decision is at the discretion of the editors of the proceedings and is based, in part, on the following recommendations:

• articles that do not respect the “CEUR Workshop Proceedings” format are not included;
• articles in French are unlikely to be included;
• regular and SoK papers are more likely to be included than short and replication papers;
• practice and abstract papers are unlikely to be included;
• included articles should describe new and innovative work;
• included articles should describe the state of the art, and position the content of the article in this context;
• included articles should contain a number of references and citations in adequation with the volume of publications related to the work described.

Articles accepted for presentation at the conference, but not included in the official conference proceedings (all articles if there are no proceedings published as a volume of “CEUR Workshop Proceedings”), are published on C&ESAR’s websites.

In order to facilitate presentation of work already pusblished elsewhere or intended for publication in another venue, authors can explicitly opt out of inclusion in any form of proceedings.

Deadlines

• Registration of proposals: Wednesday, May 22, 2024
  • title and abstract
• Submission of the proposals: Wednesday, May 22, 2024
  • detailed outline or final version up to 16 pages
• Notification of preselection to authors: Wednesday, June 26, 2024
• Submission of the final version: Wednesday, August 28, 2024
  • final version of 2 to 16 pages depending on paper type
• Notification of acceptation to authors: Wednesday, September 25, 2024
• European Cyber Week (ECW): Tuesday, November 19, 2024 to Thursday, November 21, 2024