The list of accepted papers for this years edition of the “Network and Distributed System Security” (NDSS) 2024 Symposium happening in mid-February has been published, you can find it here .

While going through the list I found it rather obvious that there are plenty of papers regarding the security of machine learning models in there - ranging from large-language models (LLM) to neuronal networks, and how to poison or extract information in them. This is currently an extremely active field of research, in particular due to publicly available LLMs like GPT-4, or generative models such as DALL-E 3 , Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. Every company right now is jumping on the hype-wagon and trying to do something useful with them, without knowing or understanding the even a fraction of the risks yet.

It’s also interesting that there are plenty of papers on fuzzing software in there. Even though insecure programming languages like C will never go fully away, I was surprised that fuzzing is still such a thing in the academic world. Also blockchain and smart contracts, I honestly thought that the hype for them is already over.

Nonetheless, plenty of good looking papers for my personal topics of interest such as network security, anonymity and overall privacy. Just judging by their title, I would read the following (without any particular order):

Last, but not least: if these papers tickle your neurons make sure to check out Philipp Winter’s Censor Bib . It has already available pre-prints linked, and is an overall great ressource for these kind of topics.