Modern computer systems are large and heterogeneous. Their complexity is hardly manageable by a human being, especially when it comes to take timely decisions to protect them from an ongoing cyber-attack.

In the last decade, the research community has explored the field of cyber-defense from several points of view, which range, among the others, from static analysis of the code and dynamic analysis of the behavior of the executables, to the design of algorithms for intrusion detection. Intrusion response is another important field that has started to receive attention in the last 5 years.

However, despite the advancements in each one of the aforementioned fields, the vision of an autonomic self-protecting system is still far from being realized. Indeed, automatically defending a computer system at run-time encompasses a large number of complex activities, that range from data capture, management and analysis, to automated decision making and automated systems operations.

In this workshop, we solicit high quality contributions that fit with the overarching idea of creating a fully automated protection system. The aim of the workshop is to share new findings, exchange ideas and discuss research challenges on the following topics (not an exhaustive list):

● Big Data collection, processing, integration, and analysis for self-protecting systems

● Intrusion Detection, either signature-based or anomaly-based

● Off-line static code-analysis and behavioral analysis of executables

● Cyber-Deception: approaches, analysis, honeypots, metrics, moving target defense

● Cyber-Ranges design and realization

● Intrusion Response and systems modeling

● Risk Management frameworks and actor modeling

● Software engineering for self-protecting systems

● Artificial Intelligence applied to self-protecting systems

● Software-defined self-protecting systems

● Machine Learning applied to self-protecting systems

● Frameworks for the integration of self-protecting systems

● Performance management and evaluation of self-protecting systems

● Evaluation of implementations based on cutting edge technologies

Furthermore, we solicit submissions that examine the self-protection problem from an holistic perspective, that is, that will consider the overall picture and propose novel software architectures, frameworks and technologies to ease the realization of self-protecting systems.


COMMITTEES
Co-Chairs
Emiliano Casalicchio, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Stefano Iannucci, Mississippi State University, MS ,USA

Technical Program Committee
Cristina Alcaraz, University of Malaga, Spain
Ghita Berrada, King's College London, UK
Valeria Cardellini, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy
Rogério de Lemos, University of Kent, UK
Flavia Delicato, Fluminense Federal University, Brazil
Rose Gamble, University of Tulsa, OK, USA
Erol Gelenbe, Imperial College London, UK
Ananth Grama, Purdue University, IN, USA
Narges Khakpour, Linnaeus University, Sweden
Andrea Montemaggio, Mississippi State University, MS, USA