CALL FOR PAPERS

The Government Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (GFIRST) program committee is soliciting original contributions for their annual Conference. Papers should be broadly based on the Conference theme GFIRST: Uniting the Cyber Response Community.

The focus of the 4^th Annual GFIRST National Conference is to identify and improve the coordination and collaboration among cyber responders in the public and private sector as well as their role supporting the law enforcement and physical emergency response community. The security of communications and IT systems and response and recovery of these essential systems in a crisis is greatly enhanced by interaction between various government and private sector security teams. Each subject track (see below) provides an opportunity for presenters to explore these issues.

Discussions and presentations will explore advances in information gathering and dissemination techniques, demonstrate proven information exchange methodologies, and provide superior training to incident responders, Chief Information Officers (CIOs), Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), and other important players in the cyber security field. The Conference provides an opportunity for the government to foster more collaboration among non-government IT security efforts, which have tended to develop separately by sector.

This Call for Papers under the theme Uniting the Cyber Response Community will present opportunities for the GFIRST community to explore vital areas of cyber response such as the importance of integrated cyber and emergency management, Web 2.0 security challenges, and intelligence fusion and information sharing practices between Federal, State, and local cyber officials as well as new risk management and analytic tools and techniques and traffic monitoring practices.

The Conference will be held at the Caribe Royale Hotel in Orlando, Florida, from June 1-6, 2008.



There are four subject tracks for the Conference:

Track 1: Management/CISO
Sessions will be directed to CIOs/CISOs, senior policy and decision makers with overall security responsibility, and senior managers directly charged with protecting their corporate infrastructure. Sessions will also approach cultural and management challenges that directly impact enhanced operational response cohesion.

Track 2: Technical
Sessions will be directed to members of security teams, incident response teams, vulnerability analysis teams, or technical staff who determine security product needs and implement solutions, and any incident response and security team members with the responsibility for coordinating computer security incidents.

Track 3: Law Enforcement
Sessions will be directed to law enforcement, consultants, contractors, and other IT professionals interested in incident response, vulnerability handling, sharing, and forensics. Additionally, whether it is cyber crime or cyber terrorism, cyber incident responders need to work within the "All Hazards" framework to increase unity across law enforcement, private sector, and emergency response agencies.

Track 4: Incident Response
Sessions will be directed to government as well as consultants, contractors, and other IT professionals interested in incident response and security practices. These topics will also address intersections of cyber and physical response.

Target Conference Audience

The Conference is expected to attract more than 800 GFIRST members, cyber incident responders, CIOs/CISOs, law enforcement personnel supporting cyber security issues, academia, and representatives from private sector incident response teams.

Time Slots

Conference presentations are generally 45 minutes to 2 hours in length, including Q&A sessions.

The GFIRST program committee welcomes original contributions on the following example topics:


Authors must obtain employer, client, or government releases prior to submitting final materials. All presentations will be included on the Conference CD-ROM and will be available on the GFIRST portal as PDF files unless special arrangements are required.

It is important that your presentation/class have the following characteristics:
Other aspects that will be considered for selection include the following:
Please note that you should NOT present with the aim of gaining the audience’s interest in any commercial application or product, so please, no marketing papers.

Submissions must reflect original work and must adequately document any overlap with previously published or simultaneously submitted papers from any of the authors. If authors have any doubts regarding whether such overlap exists, they should contact the program chairs prior to submission.

Process of Selection

The Program Committee will evaluate all submissions based on quality and relevance. All submissions are held in confidence prior to publication in the proceedings.

Submissions received after the deadline (see "Important Dates" below) may not be considered unless the program chair has granted an extension. When employer, client, or government authorization is needed, it is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain such authorization prior to submitting the final materials.

Accepted papers will be presented by their author(s) and will be published in the Conference proceedings with associated speaker biographies and photographs (unless other arrangements are requested in advance). After the Conference, presentations may also be published on the GFIRST secure portal.

Presenters will not be reimbursed for travel to and from the Conference, per diem, and hotel. No honorarium is provided for speakers

Copyright

GFIRST requires a nonexclusive copyright license for all the papers presented at the Conference and for the presentation materials. This includes distribution on the Conference CD-ROM and the GFIRST secure portal.

Important Dates

Questions

If you have any questions about the Conference or submission process or if you require more information, please send your query to gfirst@us-cert.gov.