Second Workshop on the Changing Landscape in HPC Security, 2015

Co-located with ACM HPDC June 15, Portland, OR, USA

Important dates

• Paper Submission Due: March 6, 2015
• Notification of Acceptance: March 20, 2015
• Camera Ready Version Due: April 1, 2015
• Workshop: June 15, 2015

Program (Subject to Change)

Overview

As user needs drive technological and organizational changes, providing effective and non-intrusive security within a HPC environment provides a number of challenges for both researchers and operational personnel.  While the complexity of the aggregate system increases dramatically, the need for timely and accurate decision making about user activity remains unchanged.  This growing complexity is balanced against a backdrop of routine user and application attacks, which remain surprisingly effective over time.

This workshop will focus on the problems inherent in securing contemporary large-scale compute and storage systems.  In particular we are looking at the unusual ecosystem that HPC provides - what makes it different than other large scale distributed computing environments and how this has driven how, where and why security is done.  In addition we want to address the problem of high noise, low value attacks in the overall design and implementation of security services.  What can be done to increase the effectiveness of attack detection when you are not just looking for scanners, IRC bots and spam relays?

While these specific areas are interesting starting points for papers and presentations, any original and interesting topic will be considered.

Workshop Format and Topics

The format of the workshop will be a combination of research papers and State of the Practice presentations, as well as discussion sections where specific topics will be brought up.  This format is intentional as to provide the maximum opportunity for communication between researchers, analysts and tool builders. Research papers can be either short (4 page) works in progress, or more complete (8 page) works.  State of the Practice submissions have the additional option of an abstract only since the focus will be much more on the presentation of new methods.

Besides the general class of problems described in the overview, we invite the submission of original work that is related to the topics below.

• • Accounting and Audit
  • Authentication
  • Cloud Security
  • Data and Application Security
  • Data/System Integrity
  • Database Security
  • Identity Management
  • Intrusion and Attack Detection
  • Intrusion and Attack Response
  • Legal and Policy Issues
  • Secure Networking
  • Secure System Design
  • Security Monitoring & Management
  • Security in Untrusted & Adversarial Environments and Systems
  • Security of Grid and Cluster Architectures
  • Security Visualization

Please note that these example topics are in the context of the unique set of problems and difficulties within the HPC space.   

For the State of of the Practice papers, the focus will be on the resolution of specific issues - ideally those identified in the Overview section, but really any significant problem which is endemic to the HPC domain.  Within the paper an explanation and exploration of the issue, resolution description and a numerical analysis showing that the proposed issue resolution was successful. 

In addition to the paper presentations, there will be one or two discussion sessions as well as a Keynote speaker.

Submission instructions

Authors are invited to submit papers with unpublished, original work of not more than 8 pages of double column text using single spaced 10 point size on 8.5 x 11 inch pages (including all text, figures, and references), as per ACM 8.5 x 11 manuscript guidelines (document templates can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). Papers will be peer-reviewed, and accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings as part of the ACM digital library

Submission site for papers is https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clhs2015

Organizers

• Scott Campbell, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), LBNL, USA
• Adam Slagell, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), USA

Programme Committee

Scott Campbell, LBNL/NERSC

Stephen McNally, NICS    

Nathaniel Mendoza, TACC   

Adam Slagell, NCSA    

Alexander Withers, NCSA