CUING

The increasing number of Internet users, availability of storage and network resources, and proliferation of as-a-Service frameworks, leads to a new-wave of offensive campaigns targeting the virtual world. With the diffusion of improved defensive methods, attackers now utilize more and more sophisticated techniques to perform their malicious activities. In recent years, information hiding has emerged as one of the most sophisticated and effective mechanisms for launching attacks. Threat actors now regularly use information hiding to elude countermeasures and prevent reversing the attack chain. More recently, hiding techniques have been deployed to create covert channels, i.e., parasitic communications paths nested in network traffic and digital objects, mainly to cloak command & control communications. Unfortunately, detection and mitigation of threats taking advantage of information hiding are hard tasks that pose many new challenges for digital forensics analysts, academics, law enforcement agencies, and security professionals. 

The aim of the International Workshop on Cyber Use of Information Hiding (CUIng) is to bring together researchers, practitioners, law enforcement representatives, and security professionals in the area of analysis of information hiding techniques when used in cyberspace. Techniques, mechanisms, and ideas that fall in the scope of the workshop are not limited to classic digital steganography applications or the creation and mitigation of covert communications. Therefore, CUIng also welcomes works that pertain to camouflaging/masking/hiding various types of data, e.g., identities, behaviors of processes, and communication flows. To present a more complete picture of the novel research on hiding methods and their utilization by the attackers, submissions dealing with impersonation or mimicking are encouraged as well, especially to address information hiding in a complete manner, for instance, to discuss ideas for fighting misuse of privacy-enhancing technologies. 

Moreover, the extended versions of all accepted papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Cyber Security and Mobility (indexed in Scopus).