HotSoS 2025 Program Agenda
| Times are listed in U.S. Eastern Time | |
| TUESDAY, APRIL 1 | |
| SESSION 1 | |
| Networking, log into the platform and chat with other attendees | |
| 10:00 - 10:15 |
Welcome and Opening Remarks Adam Doupe (ASU) and Kevin Leach (VU) |
| 10:15 - 11:15 |
Keynote: Burning questions in AI security Joshua Saxe (Meta) |
| 11:15 - 11:30 | BREAK |
| SESSION 2 | |
| 11:30 - 12:30 |
Best Cybersecurity Paper Competition Honorable Mention Anna-Marie Ortloff and Christian Tiefenau (University of Bonn) |
| 12:30 - 13:30 | LUNCH |
| SESSION 3 | |
| 13:30 - 14:15 |
Panel: Future of Foundational Research Neal Ziring (NSA), Evan Austin (Independent Researcher), Jeff Dickerson (NSA), Bob Kimball (Army) |
| 14:15 - 14:30 | BREAK |
| 14:30 - 15:15 |
WIP: Assessing the Effects of Source Language on Binary Similarity Tools Landen Doty and Prasad Kulkarni (The University of Kansas) Discussant: Fish Wang (ASU) |
| 15:15 - 16:00 |
WIP: K-ASTRO: Structure-Aware Adaptation of LLMs for Code Vulnerability Detection Yifan Zhang, Michael Sandborn, Stefan Larson, Yu Huang and Kevin Leach (Vanderbilt University) Discussant: Alex Kapravelos (NCSU) |
| SESSION 4 | |
| 16:00 - 16:10 | BREAK |
| 16:10 - 16:35 |
Concept-ROT: Poisoning Concepts in Large Language Models with Model Editing Keltin Grimes, Marco Christiani, David Shriver and Marissa Connor (Carnegie Melon University) |
| 16:35 - 17:00 |
PBP: Post-training Backdoor Purification for Malware Classifiers Dung Thuy Nguyen, Ngoc Tran, Taylor Johnson, and Kevin Leach (Vanderbilt University) |
| WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2 | |
| SESSION 5 | |
| 10:00 - 11:00 |
Keynote: The Complex Science of Cybersecurity Stephanie Forrest (ASU) |
| 11:00 - 11:15 | BREAK |
| SESSION 6 | |
| 11:15 - 12:00 |
Roundtable: Life After Graduate School Westley Weimer (University of Michigan), Adam Oest (PentaxForums), Jonathan Lacson (NSA), Gaelin Shupe (Battelle) |
| 12:00 - 13:45 | POSTER SESSION / LUNCH |
| SESSION 7 | |
| 13:45 - 14:30 |
WIP: An Investigation of Large Language Models and Their Vulnerabilities in Spam Detection Xiangyang Li and Qiyao Tang (Johns Hopkins University) Discussant: Arun Viswanath |
| 14:30 - 15:15 |
WIP: A Human Study of Cognitive Biases in CTF Challenges Yuwei Yang, Skyler Grandel, Daniel Balasubramanian, Yu Huang and Kevin Leach (Vanderbilt University) Discussant: Maverick Woo (CMU) |
| 15:15 - 15:30 | BREAK |
| SESSION 8 | |
| 15:30 - 16:30 |
Best Cybersecurity Paper Competition Honorable Mention Ethical Frameworks and Computer Security Trolley Problems: Foundations for Conversations Tadayoshi Kohno (University of Washington), Yasemin Acar (Paderborn University and George Washington University), Wulf Loh (Universität Tübingen) |
| 16:30 - 16:40 | BREAK |
| 16:40 - 17:05 |
Assessing AI vs Human-Authored Spear Phishing SMS Attacks: An Empirical Study Jerson Francia, Derek Hansen, Ben Schooley, Matthew Taylor, Shydra Murray, and Greg Snow (Brigham Young University) |
| 17:05 - 17:30 |
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cybervulnerability Impact Assessment for Energy Critical Infrastructure Andrea Gallardo, Lujo Bauer, and Lorrie Cranor (Carnegie Melon University) |
| THURSDAY, APRIL 3 | |
| SESSION 9 | |
| 10:00 - 11:00 |
Keynote: Solving Real-World Problems is Hard Chad Spensky (Allthenticate) |
| 11:00 - 11:30 |
2025 Best Cybersecurity Paper Competition Welcome by Shavon Donnell (NSA) Remarks by Dave Hogue (Chief, Laboratory for Advanced Cybersecurity Research) |
| 11:30 - 12:45 |
Best Cybersecurity Paper Competition Winner Decoding Trust: Comprehensive Assessment of Trustworthiness in GPT Models Boxin Wang (NVIDIA), Sanmi Koyejo (Stanford University), Dawn Song (University of California, Berkeley) |
| 12:45 - 13:45 | LUNCH |
| SESSION 10 | |
| 13:45 - 14:30 |
WIP: Steerability of Autonomous Cyber-Defense Agents by Meta-Attackers Luis Burbano and Alvaro Cardenas (U.C. Santa Cruz) Discussant: Daniel Balasubramanian (VU) |
| 14:30 - 15:15 |
WIP: BareSlice: Extending Arm CCA to Support Bare-Metal Confidential Virtual Machines Yuxin Hu and Kevin Leach (Vanderbilt University) Discussant: Manuel Egele (Boston University) |
| 15:15 - 15:30 | BREAK |
| SESSION 11 | |
| 15:30 - 15:55 |
Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Network Instrument: Measuring PQC Adoption Rates and Identifying Migration Pathways Phuong Cao (UIUC) |
| 15:55 - 16:20 |
Deanonymizing Device Identities via Side-channel Attacks in Exclusive-use IoTs & Mitigation Christopher Ellis, Mohit Kumar Jangid, Shixuan Zhao, and Zhiqiang Lin (The Ohio State University) |
| 16:20 - 16:45 |
A Grammar-Based Behavioral Distance Measure between Ransomware Variants H. Van Dyke Parunak (Parallax Advanced Research) |
| 16:45 - 17:15 |
BinSub: The Simple Essence of Polymorphic Type Inference for Machine Code Ian Smith (Trail of Bits) |
| 17:15 - 17:30 |
Announcement of Winning Poster / Closing remarks Adam Tagert (NSA) |
| SYMPOSIUM ADJOURNED | |
HoTSoS features a unique session type, the Works in Progress (WIP). This session assists authors in writing high quality research papers by having a community discussion on the research early in the research process. This early feedback enables researchers to adjust on-going research to respond to concerns traditionally raised after the research and paper are completed and it is being peer-reviewed for conferences and journals. This early presentation promotes faster and easier publication.