Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC)
The Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) serves as a platform for leading researchers, practitioners, and security professionals from academia, industry, and government to present and discuss the latest advancements in cybersecurity. With its peer-reviewed technical papers, invited talks, panels, national interest discussions, and workshops, ACSAC remains committed to its mission of exploring practical solutions for computer and network security technologies. Since 2017, ACSAC has actively promoted the publication of software and data artifacts associated with academic research papers presented at the conference. This initiative underscores the importance of publishing artifacts to enhance research reproducibility and support the real-world adoption of innovative and reliable security solutions. To further this goal, ACSAC launched the Artifacts Competition in 2022, encouraging submissions of cybersecurity artifacts previously published in peer-reviewed venues across academia and industry.
Martina Lindorfer has achieved a significant milestone by being named a Senior Fellow at the Applied Computer Security Associates (ACSA). This prestigious recognition follows her outstanding contributions, including two years as Program Committee Chair and two prior years as Artifact Evaluation Chair.
During the Opening Remarks at ACSAC 2024, the ACSAC Program Chairs emphasized the extensive effort involved in organizing the conference. The event attracted a record number of 381 submissions, which were reviewed in two rounds by 171 Program Committee Members. Ultimately, 83 submissions were accepted, reflecting an acceptance rate of 21.8%.
Since security research is often criticized for the poor reproducibility of its results, the Program Chairs introduced Reproduction and Replication (R+R) Papers this year. This track solicited studies that confirm, question, or clarify the results of previous research. Authors followed this call and out of 50 submissions in this track, 7 papers made it into the final program. This new track further strengthens ACSAC’s commitment to reproducibility since the introduction of the Artifact Evaluation in 2017 as the first security conference to do so.
Artifact Evaluation is a crucial part of the review process, ensuring that published papers are supported by high-quality artifacts, such as software, hardware, and datasets, which can be reused and built upon by others. Reviewers play a central role in this effort by assessing artifacts for their consistency with the paper, completeness, quality of documentation, and ease of reuse for future research. Beyond evaluation, reviewers collaborate closely with authors to refine artifacts that may not initially meet the required standards. Through actionable and interactive feedback, they guide authors in revising their work to align with the necessary criteria, fostering a process of continuous improvement and ensuring high-quality outcomes. This year, Carlotta Tagliaro, a PreDoc Researcher in the Security and Privacy Research Unit, made significant contributions as an Artifact Reviewer. In recognition of her exceptional efforts, she was honored with the Distinguished Artifact Reviewer Award at ACSAC 2024.
The Artifacts Competition is another significant initiative by ACSA, designed to recognize exceptional cybersecurity artifacts that have made a meaningful and lasting impact on the security and privacy research communities. Daniel Arp, as part of an international team of researchers, has been named a finalist in the competition for TESSERACT. TESSERACT is an open-source framework designed to provide unbiased, realistic, and time-aware evaluations of machine learning-based malware classification. Originally introduced alongside a research paper published at the USENIX Security Symposium 2019, the framework showcased methods to eliminate experimental bias in malware classification research.
Since its release, TESSERACT has been widely recognized, featured in keynotes and seminars, and adopted by academics and practitioners globally. It has played a pivotal role in shaping research questions and advancing experimental designs in ML-based malware detection, amassing 415 Google Scholar citations as of September 2024.
