CSA

Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) form the foundation of global economic growth and societal well-being by driving innovation, increasing productivity and enabling new digital business models. As all economic sectors become increasingly dependent on highly interconnected and data- driven digital infrastructures, the protection of cyber assets, critical information systems, and digital marketplaces has evolved into a strategic and operational priority. This context has accelerated the adoption of coordinated strategies, policies, and advanced technologies aimed at strengthening cybersecurity, enhancing situational awareness, and ensuring resilient and trusted digital environments.

Cyber Situational Awareness (CSA) has emerged as a critical, dual-use domain of technology development that enables a comprehensive and mission-oriented understanding of the cyber environment in support of planned and ongoing operations. Grounded in mission-centric reasoning, knowledge acquisition, and data-centric processing, CSA orchestrates a wide spectrum of information- processing activities to assess the current operational state, anticipate future evolutions, and infer risks whose effects may extend from digital systems to interconnected physical processes and infrastructures. Core capabilities include the identification of key cyber terrain, dynamic risk assessment and management, threat and behaviour analysis, and coordinated incident response. As digital ecosystems become increasingly complex and interconnected, effective CSA demands significantly enhanced capabilities for contextual and disruptive monitoring, complex event correlation, advanced visualisation, and smart decision-making, enabling operators to maintain timely and actionable awareness. At the same time, due to the nature of the sensitive and critical information handled by CSA solutions, cross-cutting technological challenges must be addressed, including emerging threats posed by cryptographically relevant quantum computers, standardisation and compliance constraints, and the need for resilient and interoperable architectures. These challenges also create opportunities for breakthrough contributions in education and training—such as cyber ranges—and for convergence with complementary research and technology areas, including evidence generation and notification, multisource data fusion, and visualisation through common operational pictures, ultimately strengthening decision-making and operational resilience.

In the development of CSA, a mission-oriented approach aims to ensure efficient use of resources while dynamically adapting to evolving operational conditions. Contributions are encouraged that address configurable and scalable information management solutions for cyberspace, encompassing mission plans, assets, capabilities, dependencies, priorities, and decision constraints, together with the enabling methods and technologies that support them. Particular interest is placed on approaches that demonstrate measurable performance, security, and resilience improvements for cyber defence systems, such as situational awareness platforms, analytics engines, and management dashboards deployed in Security Operations Centres (SOCs) or comparable environments. The workshop also welcomes work addressing practical aspects of CSA implementation, including system integration, testing and validation methodologies (e.g. cyber ranges, testbeds, simulations, and emulation environments), as well as deployment and operational evaluation in real or near-real settings. These contributions are expected to highlight emerging challenges, lessons learned, and opportunities for advancing robust, data-driven situational awareness and decision-support capabilities across complex digital infrastructures. 
The aim of the CSA Workshop is to bring together leading researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and public sector to discuss state-of-the-art research and emerging trends in cybersecurity, data-centric architectures, secure communications, and quantum-resilient technologies. The workshop seeks to foster innovation in mission-oriented CSA, resilient decision- making, and secure information infrastructures in support of crisis management and complex operations. Contributions are invited on novel concepts, architectures, implementations, ongoing projects, and practical experiences across related domains, including cyber defence, telecommunications, networking, multisensor data fusion, command and control, visualisation, and decision support systems.

Additionally, selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions for consideration in a planned Special Issue with a leading international publisher, in preparation for the workshop’s 10th anniversary in 2029. The organisers are in contact with publishers regarding a two-volume special edition, with the first volume envisaged for publication in 2027.