A workshop at ESORICS 2026, 14th of September 2026 in Rome, Italy.
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.
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.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited, to the following
HS3 2026 is co-located with the 31st European Symposium on Research in Computer Security in Rome, Italy. The workshop will take place right after the main conference, on the 14th of September 2026.
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 as workshop post-proceedings of ESORICS 2026. 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. Well-marked appendices do not count into the page limit; PC members are also not required to consider material presented in appendices when reviewing submissions. We will clarify the constraints for including appendices in camera-ready papers closer to the camera-ready deadline and after discussion with the workshop chairs and the publisher. We follow the ESORICS Call for Papers regarding anonymity of submissions and do not require papers to be anonymised. Anonymised submissions are, however, welcome at HS3.
Paper must be submitted through the ESORICS EasyChair website; select the “HS3” track toindicate that you are submitting to this workshop: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=esorics2026
For accepted papers, authors must agree with Springer LNCS copyright and at least one author must attend the workshop.
Programme and registration information will be updated as soon as possible.
Thomas Rokicki, IRISA, CentraleSupelec/Inria, France (co-chair)
Pierre Wilke, CentraleSupélec/Inria