IAMCOM 2007 (http://www.iamcom.org) 

Information Assurance Middleware for COMmunications (IAMCOM) workshop,
Bangalore, India, January 12, 2007 (Submissions due Sept 15, 2006)

Individual subsystems designed to operate reliably in isolation may
not be reliable when networked together: due to the complexity of
subsystem interactions and the functional heterogeneity and diversity
among the network subsystems. Although the network subsystems can be
made highly reliable by using appropriate techniques (such as capacity
over-provisioning), networking these systems together, however,
exposes them to outside attackers, so the trust placed upon these
subsystems diminishes precipitously. Communications middleware allows
dealing with the diversity and heterogeneity among network subsystems
through a set of generic software/hardware, protocol and/or modeling
tools. These tools often reside in the management stations that
'oversee' the proper functioning of communication session activities
between application end-points: in terms of performance, QoS, and
integrity, and availability. A communication system is deemed as
dependable if it can provide some minimal functional guarantees to the
on-going communication sessions in the presence of attacks and/or
failures occurring at one or more network subsystems.

The heterogeneity in network software and hardware diminishes the
power of attackers to cripple the whole system. This advantage can be
reaped to a full extent only if the heterogeneity itself does not
become an impediment in dealing with the failures and attacks that may
actually occur. Middleware for dependable communications addresses the
issues of providing sustainable guarantees on session-level QoS,
performance, integrity, availability and security through a repertoire
of generic software/hardware tools and models.

The goal of IAMCOM workshop is to offer a focused forum to discuss the
on-going research in the area of middleware for dependable
communications. Papers are solicited on middleware topics pertaining
to the communication layers of a distributed network system: Topics of
interest include, but not limited to:

  a.. QoS assurance architectures 
  b.. Network state fusion, monitoring 
  c.. Tools for detecting DOS attacks 
  d.. Utility-based QoS adaptation 
  e.. Communication security: authentication, confidentiality 
  f.. Adaptive encryption techniques 
  g.. Capacity provisioning 
  h.. Network survivability 
  i.. Dynamic bandwidth allocations 
  j.. Traffic engineering 
  k.. Distributed consensus/voting 
  l.. Self-healing networks 
  m.. Topology management 
  n.. Failure detectors 
  o.. Diversity management and control

For more information, please see http://www.iamcom.org