PROvable Security and Privacy Applications (PROSPA) 2025

Provable security is essential for assessing the security of modern cryptographic primitives, ensuring high confidence in trustworthy and secure cyber systems, be that through cryptographic reductions at the primitive level, symbolic analysis over whole systems or many other proof techniques. Each methodology has significantly enhanced the analysis of cryptographic schemes, protocols, and their implementations in secure environments. Despite challenges in building and verifying the correctness of proofs, many security flaws have been uncovered in cryptographic schemes and protocols previously thought to be secure, thanks to provable security methods. Moreover, they provide the basis for building and deploying secure protocols in the real world.

PROSPA seeks papers on any topic around provable security, such as formal security models, cryptographic primitives, relationships between security properties, tools and techniques for secure design and rigorous analysis of security mechanisms, as well as their applications to real-world systems.

Areas of Interest

Authors are invited to submit original research papers on including but not limited to

  • Provable security for cryptography
  • Provable security for physical attacks
  • Provable post-quantum cryptography
  • Security notions, approaches, and paradigms
  • Formal methods for security
  • Formal methods for security analysis
  • Formal methods for artificial intelligence, including machine learning and data-based techniques
  • Tools and case studies supporting the integration of formal methods
  • Combining formal methods with different performance, simulation and system analysis techniques
  • Privacy and anonymity technologies
  • Privacy-enhancing technologies
  • Secure cryptographic protocols and applications
  • Approaches to integration of formal methods into practice and certification processes

Important Dates

All deadlines are on the given day, 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth). 

  • Submission: March 2025
  • Notification: April 2025
  • Camera-ready: 12 May 2025, 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth). 
  • Workshop run in parallel with main conference: afternoon of 26 June 2025. Conference is running in interval 23-26 June 2025.

Paper Submission

Submissions must be anonymous, with no author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, or obvious references. Each submission must begin with a title, short abstract, and a list of keywords. The introduction should summarize the contributions of the paper at a level appropriate for a non-specialist reader.

All submissions must be submitted in PDF format, following the unmodified LNCS format (accessible on the Springer LCNS author guidelines webpage) and typeset using the corresponding LaTeX class file. They must fit within a page limit of 20 pages, including title and abstract, figures, etc., but excluding references. Optionally, any amount of clearly marked supplementary material may be supplied, following the main body of the paper; however, reviewers are not required to read or review any supplementary material, and submissions are expected to be intelligible without it. Submissions not meeting these guidelines risk rejection without consideration of their merits. To accommodate for changes requested in reviews, the page limit for the camera-ready proceedings versions is 30 pages, including references and appendices.

For papers that might raise ethical concerns, authors are expected to convince reviewers that proper procedures (such as Institutional Review Board approval) have been followed, and due diligence has been made to minimize potential harm. We will publish our proceedings with Springer as a volume of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

Conflicts of Interest

The program co-chairs require cooperation from both authors and program committee members to prevent submissions from being evaluated by reviewers who have a conflict of interest. During the submission process, we will ask authors to identify members of the program committee with whom they share a conflict of interest.

We regard the following relationships as conflicts of interest:

  1. Anyone who shares an institutional affiliation with an author at the time of submission (including secondary affiliations and consulting work),
  2. Anyone who was the advisor or advisee of an author at any time in the past,
  3. Anyone the author has collaborated or published within the prior two years,
  4. Anyone who is serving as the sponsor or administrator of a grant that funds your research, or
  5. Close personal or family ties.

If authors want to specify a conflict of another type than those listed above, they must contact the chairs and explain the perceived conflict. Program committee members who are in a conflict of interest with a paper, including program co-chairs, will be excluded from the evaluation and discussion of the paper by default.

Registration

The registration is managed by the conference ACNS 2025 https://acns2025.fordaysec.de. Authors of selected PROSPA papers are expected to register for ACNS and present in-person for PROSPA. As part of their registration, they can attend all ACNS events and all other workshops.

Organisation

Program Committee Co-Chairs

  • Daniel Gardham (University of Surrey)
  • Constantin Catalin Dragan (University of Surrey)

Web Chair

  • Nick Frymann (University of Surrey)

Program Committee

TBC