A workshop at ESORICS 2025, 25th of September 2025 in Toulouse, FR.
The HS3 workshop seeks to share experience, tools and methodology on hardware-assisted software security. We are looking forward to submissions that propose new architectures offering better resilience against software attacks. These architectures should rely on hardware-based security mechanisms to protect the software stack. One of the challenges is to formally specify and verify the security guarantees offered by such architectures and to better assess the security guarantees provided by existing hardware architectures against software attacks, especially attacks against micro-architecture. This can be achieved by identifying new vulnerabilities using reverse engineering, fuzzing or other attack approaches. The goal of the HS3 workshop is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government that work on hardware-assisted software security. HS3 2025 has a special theme on “Secure Monitoring, Intrusion Detection, and Incident Response” and we are specifically looking forward to submissions that present hardware-assisted approaches in this domain.
Combining software and hardware aspects to consider new software attacks is becoming increasingly important. For example, hardware vulnerabilities such as Spectre or Meltdown can be exploited purely by software attacks. Such attacks can be executed remotely and do not require physical access to the targeted hardware platform. On the other hand, hardware features can be used to better detect and respond to traditional software attacks, such as memory corruption. Therefore, it is necessary to study the security of software/hardware interfaces in terms of attacks and defences.
The purpose of the HS3 workshop is to share experience, tools and methodology on hardware-assisted software security. On one hand, we need to propose new architectures offering better resilience against software attacks. These architectures should rely on hardware-based security mechanisms to protect the software stack. One of the challenges is to formally specify and verify the security guarantees offered by such architectures. On the other hand, we also need to assess better the security guarantees provided by existing hardware architectures against software attacks, especially attacks against micro-architecture. This can be achieved by identifying new vulnerabilities using reverse engineering, fuzzing or other attack approaches. The goal of the HS3 workshop is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government that work on hardware-assisted software security.
Intrusion Detection System have become ubiquitous cybersecurity tools that monitor network traffic or other system activity to then identify anomalous behaviour or policy violations. Upon detection, these systems may alert security teams or central security systems, reporting potential threats, or even trigger automated responses. For this year’s edition of the HS3 workshop, we especially encourage submissions that investigate questions regarding the hardware-supported design of such systems. We are specifically interested in submissions in the area of secure monitoring, intrusion detection, and incident response, and we seek to develop a special track, potentially with invited talks or panel discussions, on this domain.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited, to the following
HS3 2025 is co-located with the 30th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security in Toulouse, France. The workshop will take place right after the main conference, on the 25th of September 2025.
A plain-text version of this Call for Papers is available.
There are two categories of submissions:
All papers must be written in English and describe original work that has not been published or submitted elsewhere. The submission category (regular paper, short paper, special theme) should be clearly indicated. Members of the The Program Committee will fully review all submissions. Papers will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. Contact the Program Chairs if you do not want your short paper to appear in the proceedings.
Papers must be typeset in LaTeX using the LNCS template. Failure to adhere to the page limit and formatting requirements can be grounds for rejection.
For accepted papers, at least one author must attend the workshop.
Details on participation will appear soon. For now please focus on submitting something :-)
Jan Tobias Muehlberg, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium (co-chair)
Pierre Wilke, CentraleSupélec/Inria