The International Workshop on Security and Privacy for SMEs (SME-SP 2021) is held in conjunction with the 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security – ARES 2021, between August 17 – August 20, 2021.
The SME-SP workshop aims to assess SMEs&MEs’ risks, vulnerabilities or exposure to attacks holistically and improve their capabilities to reduce and efficiently manage issues arising from cybersecurity and data protection aspects. Each SME&ME has very limited knowledge of its own security, privacy, and data protection vulnerabilities. Knowledge and understanding of the risks of similar SMEs&MEs or the entire community and the preparedness for addressing these risks are currently low.

This lack implies an ambiguity of the SMEs&MEs to understand their safety in relation to cyber threats, i.e., whether there is any need for action, and what it should do to avoid or mitigate risks.
The SME-SP Workshop aspires to bring together academics, CERTs, and industrials, including owners of SMEs&MEs to discuss ideas, approaches, models, and tools to help SME&MEs in Europe to manage their cyber-risks considering their specificities, scale, and business-related constraints.
Topics of interest include, but not limited to:
- Continuous risk management.
- Smart vulnerability scanning and threat identification.
- Advanced Intrusion and Prevention Detection techniques.
- Smart testing techniques for cybersecurity and privacy.
- Advanced monitoring techniques for cybersecurity and privacy.
- Root cause analysis and reaction strategies.
- ML/AI-based SIEM.
- ML/AI-based cybersecurity.
- Honeypots and darknets.
- Cyber Threat Intelligence.
- Blockchain-based cybersecurity and privacy techniques.
- Correlation between physical and cyberthreats.
- Training, cyber ranges exercises, raising awareness approaches and tools for SMEs&MEs.
- Semi-/fully automatic mitigation and reaction.
- Resilience techniques.
- Cost and impact of countermeasures.
- Prevention and protection in distributed systems and networks.
- Prevention and protection in edge and mobile systems.
- Innovative cybersecurity methods for cloud, edge, fog, IoT, CPS, 4G/5G, and SDN/NFV environments.
- Mobile security/privacy policies.
- Mobile protocols and protocol security.
- Securing private data on mobile devices or smartphones.
- Managing BYOD in SMEs.
- Human factors in security and privacy
- Usable security and privacy
- Security and privacy awareness
- Security communication and behaviour.
- Cybersecurity culture in SMEs&MEs.
Important dates:
- Submission Deadline April 30th, 2021
- Author Notification May 24th, 2021
- Proceedings Version June 13, 2021
- ARES EU Symposium August 17, 2021
- All-Digital Conference August 17 – August 20, 2021
Submission Guidelines:
The submission guidelines valid for the workshop are the same as for the ARES conference. They can be found at https://www.ares-conference.eu/conference/submission/.