Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Since 2003, IMF has established itself as one of the premier venues for presenting research on IT security incident response and management and IT forensics. While the first IMF conference was organized to establish a research forum for German-speaking researchers and practitioners from the field, it soon became an international conference attracting many experts across Europe. 2024 being the 13th Conference, it is also an important milestone in connecting IT security incident management, IT forensics and their respective legal frameworks.

IMF provides an informal collaborative environment each year that brings together leading researchers, practitioners, industry, tool developers, academics, law enforcement, and other government bodies from around the globe to tackle current and emerging challenges in their fields.

Accepted papers will be published in the ACM DTRAP Journal as a Special Issue and will be Open Access.

We invite original contributions as research papers, non-research practitioner presentations, and panels on the following topics in digital forensics and IT security incident response and management:

IT Security Incident Management

• Incident management and the law
• Incident management standardization, metrics and life cycle
• Incident management formats and protocols
• Incident response and/or Vulnerability response workflows, procedures and tools
• Incident analysis including live analysis
• Research in incident management and related processes
• Development of tools supporting incident management processes
• Sharing of data/information about threats, attacks, incidents, etc.
• Setup of cyber defense entities including but not limited to: CSIRTs, PSIRTs, ISACs, SOCs and any other organization specialising in (some) IT security incident management processes
• Maturity of such cyber defense entities
• Warning of large scale communities about upcoming threats or detected vulnerabilities
• Ensuring situational awareness and early warning
• Mandatory vs. discretionary attack / incident / vulnerability reporting
• Non-traditional incident management scenarios and approaches (such as IoT, OT, Industry 4.0)

IT Forensics

• Digital evidence, IT forensics and the law
• Research and development of tools supporting digital forensics
• Large-scale analytic approaches to forensics, including data collection, data mining, and large-scale visualization
• Digital forensic laboratories and other organizations specialising in digital forensic science
• Addressing forensic challenges of systems-on-a-chip
• Anti-forensics and anti-anti-forensics
• Bridging the gap between analog and digital traces/evidence/investigators
• Case studies and trend reports
• Data hiding and discovery
• Data recovery and reconstruction
• Database forensics
• Digital evidence storage and preservation
• Event reconstruction methods and tools
• Interpersonal communications and social network analysis
• Malware and targeted attacks: analysis, attribution
• Memory analysis and snapshot acquisition
• Mobile and embedded device forensics
• Multimedia forensic analysis
• Network and distributed system forensics
• Non-traditional forensic scenarios and approaches (e.g. vehicles, control systems, and SCADA)
• Storage forensics, including file system and Flash
• Tool testing and development
• Triage, prioritization, automation: efficiently processing large amounts of data in digital forensics
• Typology of digital traces
• Virtualized environment forensics, with specific attention to the cloud and virtual machine introspection

The above list is only suggestive. We welcome new, original ideas from people in academia, industry, government, and law enforcement who are interested in sharing their results, knowledge, and experience. Authors are encouraged to demonstrate the applicability of their work to practical issues.  Questions about submission topics can be sent via email to pc-chair(at)imf-conference.org.  Please address general queries about IMF to 2024(at)imf-conference.org.

Submission Details

IMF invites to submit full papers, presenting novel and mature research results, as well as practice papers, describing best practices, case studies, or lessons learned. The maximum paper length for full papers is 20 pages, including the bibliography and well-marked appendices. Short papers for reporting early research results or best practice approaches are limited to 10 pages.

Research papers and presentation proposals must be submitted through the ScholarOne Manuscript DTRAP site at <https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/dtrap>. Details about the submission format are listed here: https://dl.acm.org/journal/dtrap/author-guidelines.

A specific cover letter is not required here; an empty page suffices.

All submissions must be written in the English language (see below) and submitted in PDF format. Submissions must be anonymized. Authors of accepted papers must ensure that their papers will be presented at the conference. Submitted full papers must not substantially overlap papers that have been published elsewhere or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings.

All submissions will be reviewed by the program committee and papers accepted for presentation at the conference will be included in the conference proceedings.

Send any questions about research paper / presentation proposal submissions to: pc-chair(at)imf-conference.org.

Language

IMF 2024's scope is international. Hence all submissions must be written in English language. Presentations of accepted papers must be given in English language as well.

Publication

Accepted papers will be published by ACM DTRAP and only be available online.

Dates and Deadlines (for regular papers and special sessions)

Papers & Presentation/Panel Proposals: April 21, 2024 23:59 (UTC) -> Extended deadline: May 5, 2024 @ 23:59 (UTC)
Author notification: July 10, 2024
Final draft papers due & presenter registration: July 31, 2024
Conference Dates: September 17, 2024 - September 18, 2024

Conference Chairs

Harald Baier
Universität der Bundeswehr München, Germany

Dominik Brodowski
Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

Christoph Sorge
Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

Holger Morgenstern
Albstadt-Sigmaringen University, Germany

chair(at)imf-conference.org

Technical Programme Committee Chairs

Andreas Dewald
ERNW Research GmbH, Germany

Thomas Schreck
HS München, Germany

pc-chair(at)imf-conference.org

Technical Programm Committee

TBC

Steering Committee

Harald Baier
Sandra Frings
Oliver Göbel
Detlef Günther
Holger Morgenstern
Jens Nedon
Felix Freiling
Dirk Schadt

Under the Auspices of

German Informatics Society (GI e.V.)
Wissenschaftszentrum Ahrstr. 45, 53175 Bonn, Germany Tel.: +49 228 302 145, Fax: +49 228 302 167

Special Interest Group SIDAR