Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

Network and Distributed System Security Symposium
The Opte Project · CC BY 2.5 · source
Name	Network and Distributed System Security Symposium
Status	Active
Frequency	Annual
Discipline	Computer security
Venue	Varies
First	1993
Organizer	Internet Society

Network and Distributed System Security Symposium is an annual technical conference that focuses on threats, defenses, measurement, and design for networked systems. The symposium brings together researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and Princeton University alongside practitioners from Cisco Systems, Google, Microsoft, Amazon (company), and Facebook. Attendees often include representatives from Internet Engineering Task Force, National Institute of Standards and Technology, European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and National Science Foundation.

Overview

The symposium emphasizes rigorous research in computer science subfields such as cryptography, networking (computer science), operating system security, distributed computing, and machine learning for security; contributors hail from institutions like University of Cambridge, ETH Zurich, University of Oxford, Tsinghua University, and Nanyang Technological University. Program committees have featured members from Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, and University of Washington while industrial program chairs represent firms such as Intel Corporation, IBM, Qualcomm, Oracle Corporation, and Akamai Technologies. The symposium operates alongside related venues including USENIX Security Symposium, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, NDSS Symposium (conference), and Black Hat (conference).

History and Evolution

The symposium traces roots to early 1990s workshops involving researchers from DARPA, Stanford Research Institute, Bell Labs, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Southern California. Over time the event expanded with contributions from European Organization for Nuclear Research, University of Toronto, McGill University, Seoul National University, and Peking University. Key milestones include integration of measurement papers influenced by datasets from CAIDA, policy discussions with participants from European Commission, and deployment case studies involving AT&T, Verizon Communications, and British Telecom. Evolutionary phases saw shifts toward adversarial machine learning papers involving teams from DeepMind, OpenAI, Facebook AI Research, and Microsoft Research.

Conference Topics and Scope

Topics span threat analysis, protocol design, system measurement, and empirical studies with case studies involving Cloudflare, Akamai Technologies, Alibaba Group, Tencent, and Spotify (service). Research areas often overlap with work from RSA Conference, DEF CON, CanSecWest, Chaos Communication Congress, and ShmooCon. Accepted work has included cross-disciplinary collaborations with Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, Mayo Clinic, NASA, and European Space Agency addressing security for Internet of Things, smart grid, autonomous vehicles, and industrial control systems.

Submission and Review Process

Submission procedures mirror those of leading venues, with double-blind peer review by committees composed of faculty from Cornell University, Rutgers University, University of California, San Diego, University of Maryland, College Park, and University of Michigan. Reviewers often include practitioners from Palo Alto Networks, FireEye, CrowdStrike, Symantec, and Trend Micro, while shepherding and rebuttal phases involve researchers from Imperial College London, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, University of New South Wales, and Australian National University. The symposium enforces ethical disclosure aligned with policies from Association for Computing Machinery and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Notable Papers and Contributions

Influential papers presented at the symposium have been cited alongside work by authors affiliated with Turing Award laureates at University of California, Berkeley, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Bell Labs Research. Contributions include measurement studies using datasets from RIPE NCC, routing security advances intersecting with Border Gateway Protocol, DNS security research impacting Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, cryptographic protocol analyses resonating with standards from IETF, and large-scale empirical studies informing policy at European Commission and Federal Communications Commission. Past presentations have influenced practice at Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, and Kubernetes.

Awards and Recognition

The symposium confers best paper and distinguished paper recognitions evaluated by committees including members from National Academy of Sciences, Royal Society, Academia Sinica, Max Planck Society, and Chinese Academy of Sciences. Awarded works have later received broader attention in venues like ACM SIGCOMM, IEEE INFOCOM, NeurIPS, ICML, and SIGMETRICS. Individual contributors have been later honored with awards from ACM, IEEE, Royal Academy, and national funding agencies such as National Science Foundation, European Research Council, and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Organization and Sponsorship

Organization typically involves partnerships among professional bodies such as Internet Society, Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE Computer Society, USENIX, and academic hosts from University of California, Berkeley or Stanford University with sponsorship from corporations including Google, Microsoft, Amazon (company), Cisco Systems, Intel Corporation, NVIDIA, Facebook, Arista Networks, VMware, Red Hat, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, and Akamai Technologies. Local organizers have included university departments from University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, University of California, San Diego, and University of Maryland, College Park.

Category:Computer security conferences