DAI-SNAC 2021

Descriptive Approaches to IoT Security, Network, and Application Configuration

DAI-SNAC 2021

An ACM CoNEXT 2021 Workshop

CALL FOR PAPERS

• Conference date: December 7, 2021 (virtual event)
• Full paper submission due: EXTENDED TO September 24, 2021

Background

IoT networks need to connect a large number of nodes that cannot each be the subjects of extensive individual attention, leading to the saying that they are composed of “cattle”, not “pets”.

The networks are no longer in a position where they can provide unlimited connectivity to whoever turns up, both for ensuring resource conservation (including energy preservation) and for minimizing the impact of attacks on their performance. Applications need to work with a wide variety of nodes for each of which they cannot have custom code. Security applications need to understand what is in the network, both to provide the nodes with security information they need to become operational, and to assess any vulnerabilities in the network.

Machine-processable descriptions of nodes and networks as a whole have been developed both as a way to enable the setup of desirable connectivity and as a way to describe application semantics, which can in turn be mined to provide information about desirable communication and interaction behavior. In contrast to classical configuration mechanisms based on pre-defined commands that need to be issued to set up and inspect a node or (a subset of) a network deployment, we are now more interested in a more detailed semantic description that can be input to inference, planning, setup, inventory and discovery processes, further opening to a high degree of automation and performance improvements.

This workshop is intended to bring together researchers in semantic modeling of IoT systems with researchers that are interested in operating the IoT systems and the encompassing applications based on these node descriptions, by deriving application semantics as well as implementing the setup, use and enforcement of connectivity and security configurations from those semantics.

Potential topics

Examples of research areas considered include:

• Descriptive modeling of IoT Devices and Networks as well as their properties, including those describing communication and security information
• Workflows that establish the descriptive models that pertain to a specific IoT device/network instance
• Transforming knowledge about IoT devices/networks into network and security configurations, e.g. for reliable and authenticated connectivity
• Employing IoT device- and network-model information for performance improvements, e.g. minimizing the consumption of network and device energy resources
• Security workflows that can benefit from IoT device and network modeling
• Setting up communication relationships (rendezvous) based on device/network models and operational models
• Integrating model components from different parties (manufacturers and their OEMs, network operators, device operators) into models that can be used for setup and operation of IoT devices and networks

Call for Submissions

DAI-SNAC welcomes submission of both regular and short papers (2-column, 10pt ACM format, see CoNEXT 2021 formatting guidelines).

Regular papers fit within 6 pages (one additional page for appendices and unlimited pages for references); short papers can be 2-4 page position papers, work-in-progress reports, lessons learned, breaking results… and will be reviewed with a more open mind towards the scope of evaluation or breadth of topics compared to regular papers.

We welcome experience submissions that clearly articulate lessons learned, as well as submissions that refute prior published results. Authors should submit only original work that has not been published before and is not under submission to any other venue. We will consider full paper submissions that extend previously published short, preliminary papers (including workshop papers), following the model of the ACM SIGCOMM policy.

We expect to be flexible on length and format given relevant submissions.

Submissions will not be anonymous. Papers must include author names and affiliations for single-blind peer reviewing by the program committee. Authors of accepted submissions are expected to present and discuss their work at the workshop.

Paper submission: https://dai-snac21.hotcrp.com/

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Important Dates

• Full Paper submission due: EXTENDED TO 2021-09-24

• Acceptance notifications: 2021-10-13
• Camera Ready due: 2021-10-24, AoE
• Workshop date: 2021-12-07

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People:

General Chairs:

• Carsten Bormann, Universität Bremen, Germany
• Mohit Sethi, Ericsson & Aalto University, Finland

Technical Program Committee:

• Victor Charpenay, École des Mines de Saint-Étienne (EMSE), France – co-chair
• Marco Tiloca, RISE, Sweden – co-chair
• Antonis Michalas, Tampere University & RISE, Finland/Sweden
• Ari Keränen, Ericsson, Finland
• Carlo Vallati, University of Pisa, Italy
• Emmanuel Baccelli, INRIA, France
• Henk Birkholz, Fraunhofer, Germany
• Lionel Medini, Unversité Claude Bernard (Lyon), France
• Matthias Wählisch, FU Berlin, Germany
• Maxime Lefrançois, Mines Saint-Étienne, France
• Michael McCool, Intel
• Yki Kortesniemi, Aalto University, Finland

Program

(all times are CET, UTC+1):

|  CET |                                    |
|------|------------------------------------|
| 1200 | Welcome                            |
| 1210 | keynote, discussion                |
| 1300 | break 1                            |
| 1315 | talk 1, discussion                 |
| 1345 | talk 2, discussion                 |
| 1415 | talk 3, discussion                 |
| 1445 | break 2                            |
| 1500 | talk 4, discussion                 |
| 1530 | talk 5, discussion                 |
| 1600 | talk 6, discussion                 |
| 1630 | break 3                            |
| 1645 | panel: 2 or 3 impulse talks, panel |
| 1750 | wrap-up                            |
| 1800 | end of workshop                    |

All talks (except for the keynote) have a 30-minute slot; the presentation part should be complete after 18 minutes, so we have at least 12 minutes for discussion.

List of talks:

|    Talk | Title                                                                                                         |
|---------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Keynote | How do we learn about devices on our networks? Manufacturer Usage Descriptions (MUD) Lessons Learned Thus Far |
|       1 | Towards a Behavioral Description of Cyber-Physical Systems Using the Thing Description                        |
|       2 | PARVP: Passively Assessing Risk of Vulnerable Passwords for HTTP Authentication in Networked Cameras          |
|       3 | Operating Large-Scale IoT Systems through Declarative Configuration APIs [PDF                                 |
|       4 | Discovery and capabilities of guard proxies for CoRE networks                                                 |
|       5 | IPC Evolution thru Declarative Interface Generation                                                           |
|       6 | Trustworthy Things                                                                                            |