A 2-day conference exploring state-of-the-art advances in security automation.

We would like to share the call for papers for THREADS 2014, a research and development conference that is part of NYU-Poly’s Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW). Trail of Bits is a founding sponsor of THREADS. The final deadline for submissions is October 6th, but you are encouraged to apply earlier.

This year’s theme for THREADS is scaling security — ensuring that security is an integral and automated part of software development and deployment models. In previous years THREADS served as a discussion forum for major developments in the security industry, like mobile security and Cyber Faster Track.

We need to scale security because every day we trust more about our lives and our society to internetworked information systems. The development of these systems is accelerating in pace and increasing in complexity — it is now common to deploy code multiple times per minute to worldwide production systems. To cope with this increasing complexity, more development and deployment tasks are becoming fully automated.

Security must be a core part of our new technology and fully integrated into an increasingly automated development and deployment model. THREADS will present new research and developments about integrating security into modern software development and operations.

Highlights from CSAW 2012 where the first THREADS conference was held

THREADS 2014: Security Automation

Companies such as Amazon and Netflix deploy code to worldwide production systems several times per minute. Tesla automobiles download software updates over the Internet to provide new functionality. An Internet-connected thermostat is a best-selling home automation gadget.

Traditional models of security are increasingly irrelevant in a rapidly updated world of Internet-connected devices. Gating deployments by manual security assessments would erase the point of agile development and continuous deployment. Endpoint security products can’t target rapidly updated customized embedded platforms like cars and thermostats. The new model of security has to focus on automation, integration, detection and response time.

This year’s THREADS conference will focus on how to automate security. The goal of automating security is to ensure that security is never a roadblock, but a core part of development and operations. The success of automated security is essential to our ever more internetworked society and devices.

DAY 1: RESEARCH

The research portion of THREADS will discuss the latest academic and industrial advances in security automation for the identification of errors in programs and intrusions in networks. This will include dynamic and static analysis, symbolic execution and constraint solving, data flow tracking and fuzz testing, host and network monitoring, and related technologies. This research advances the state of the art in reasoning about applications and systems to discover security vulnerabilities, identify flaws in applications, and formulate effective defenses.

DAY 2: DEVELOPMENT

The development portion of THREADS will discuss strategies to integrate security into your development pipeline: what automated analysis tools are available, how to integrate them with developers, and how to provide feedback to developers that encourages reporting instead of assigning blame. Other sessions will show you how to add security monitoring triggers to existing monitoring infrastructure, and how to tune these triggers to information attackers want to steal. Our focus is on practical examples and lessons learned when automating security.

Join Us!

Join us on November 13-14, 2014 at NYU-Poly (5 Metrotech Center, Brooklyn, NY 11201) for the 3rd annual THREADS Conference. We’re incredibly excited about the lineup this year and will be announcing keynote and first round speakers soon.

• Register as an attendee
• Submit a presentation proposal
• View archived presentations from past conferences

About THREADS

THREADS is a conference that focuses on pragmatic security research and new discoveries in network attack and defense. It is part of NYU-Poly’s Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) in Brooklyn, NY. THREADS is chaired by NYU-Poly Hacker in Residence and Trail of Bits CEO Dan Guido and the program committee includes Sergey Bratus (Dartmouth), Julien Vanegue (Bloomberg), John Viega (Silver Sky), Max Caceres (the D. E. Shaw group), Rajendra Umadas (Etsy), Phyllis Frankl (NYU-Poly), Tyler Bohan (NYU-Poly), Justin Cappos (NYU-Poly), and Travis Goodspeed (Bloomberg).

THREADS aims to present and discuss cutting edge, peer reviewed, industrial and academic research in computer and network security and focuses on advances in attack techniques and methodologies. We want to discuss what vulnerabilities exist and how attackers of today and tomorrow exploit those vulnerabilities.