EmergencyComm 2020

The International Workshop on Security, Privacy, and Trust for Emergency Events (EmergencyComm 2020)

Workshop Chairs

Shamik Sengupta, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
Charles Kamhoua, US Army Research Laboratory
Laurent Njilla, US Air Force Research Laboratory

Steering Committee

Abdur Shahid, Concord University, USA (co-chair)
Shahriar Badsha, University of Nevada, Reno, USA (co-chair)
Georges Kamhoua, Old Dominion University, USA
Tauhidul Alam, Louisiana State University Shreveport, USA

The novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (also known as COVID-19), that emerged in late December 2019, has put the whole world in a complete shutdown by March 2020. The global economy is on the verge of unprecedented collapse, and the world population is staying at home. While it is crushing the healthcare systems, it has also revealed how unprepared and vulnerable cyberspace is in the face of a pandemic. Organizations around the world are watching their threat surface multiply as employees are operating outside the direct supervision of their specialized IT infrastructure. Account takeovers and data-scraping attacks on e-commerce websites have increased with the surge of the pandemic. Emails are being hit by phishing scams and malware schemes which are promising economic stimulus checks. Social networks are flooded with fake information and stalkers are taking advantage of fake pandemic tracking mobile apps. Sadly, it seems like the privacy debate is finally over as the government needs to deploy large surveillance operations to track people in order to contain the pandemic. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art privacy-preserving methods are not capable of handling such scenarios. Once COVID-19 is over, a paradigm shift in the areas of security, privacy, and trust is highly desirable in order to make cyberspace ready for the next catastrophic emergency event.

Against this backdrop, the goal of EmergencyComm 2020 is to bring together researchers and practitioners to share their ideas and findings in order to adapt state-of-the-art security, privacy, and trust practices to address emergency events. Therefore, this workshop invites papers in the areas of:

  • Emergency security, privacy, and trust in Social and e-health networks
  • Emergency safety, security, and privacy for smart city applications
  • Protecting e-health data from Ransomware
  • Emergency monitoring of e-health
  • On the fly and robust validation of emergency requests
  • Ethics and legal considerations in location tracking and social media disinformation
  • Distributed trust and reputation establishment in decentralized environments
  • Blockchain technologies to establish information transparency and traceability in social and health networks
  • Fast and trusted Interoperable blockchains for e-health care and IT systems
  • Privacy-preserving data mining and machine learning for emergency events
  • Security, privacy, and trust in Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled emergency response
  • Emergency event fraudulent app detection

Submit paper to this workshop

The workshop is also interested in prototype demonstrations of novel solutions in the scope of emergency events.

Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version to a special issue of Sensors Journal (Q1, IF: 3.031).

Important dates:

Workshop Papers Due: July 19, 2020
Notification of Acceptance: August 5, 2020
Camera Ready: August 31, 2020 (hard deadline for publication)
Workshop Date: October 24, 2020 (date changed)

Publication Chair:

ASM Kayes, La Trobe University, Australia

Publicity Chair:

Shafkat Islam, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
Farhan Sadique, University of Nevada, Reno, USA

Technical Program Committee of the Workshop:

Alex Ng, La Trobe University, Australia
Samia Tasnim, Florida A&M University, USA
Gregory Reis, Florida International University, USA
Abdur Rahim Mohammad Forkan, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
Sajedul Talukder, Edinboro University, USA
Mustakimur Khandaker, Florida State University, USA
Iman Vakilinia, University of North Florida
Mohammad Saidur Rahman, RMIT University, Australia
Concepcion Sanchez Aleman, Florida International University, USA
Hussein Zangoti, Florida International University, USA
Raj Shukla, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
Amar Patra, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
Ahmed Imteaj, Florida International University, USA
Thejas Gubbi Sadashiva, Tarleton State University, Texas A&M University System, USA
Dr. Anand Nayyar, Duy Tan University, Da Nang, Vietnam

Submission Instructions:

It is required that authors follow the Springer LNCS format. Papers must be in English. The maximum length of a paper should be no more than 12 pages, including references. Submitted papers should not have been previously published or under consideration for publication in another journal or conference. Paper submissions must include titles, abstracts, keywords, authors, and affiliations with email addresses. Paper reviews will be single-blind. The listing of authors CANNOT be changed in the camera-ready version of the paper. The paper formatting instructions and templates can be found from the conference website (https://securecomm.org/call-for-papers/#authorskit).