The Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF) is an annual conference for researchers in computer security, to examine current theories of security, the formal models that provide a context for those theories, and techniques for verifying security. It was created in 1988 as a workshop of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Security and Privacy, in response to a 1986 essay by Don Good entitled “The Foundations of Computer Security—We Need Some.” The meeting became a “symposium” in 2007, along with a policy for open, increased attendance. Over the past two decades, many seminal papers and techniques have been presented first at CSF. For more details on the history of the symposium, visit CSF's home.

The program includes papers, panels, and a poster session. Topics of interest include access control, information flow, covert channels, cryptographic protocols, database security, language-based security, authorization and trust, verification techniques, integrity and availability models, and broad discussions concerning the role of formal methods in computer security and the nature of foundational research in this area.


The CSF 2020 proceedings are available at IEEE Xplore. This year's distinguished papers:

  • A Method for Proving Unlinkability of Stateful Protocols
  • David Baelde, Stéphanie Delaune, and Solène Moreau
  • Fifty Shades of Ballot Privacy: Privacy against a Malicious Board
  • Véronique Cortier, Joseph Lallemand, and Bogdan Warinschi
  • Transparent IFC Enforcement: Possibility and (In)Efficiency Results
  • Maximilian Algehed and Cormac Flanagan

Important Dates AoE (UTC-12h)

Fall cycle submission   October 4, 2019
Fall cycle notification   December 13, 2019
Winter cycle submission   February 7, 2020
Winter cycle notification   April 17, 2020
Author registration deadline   June 15, 2020
CSF Symposium   June 22-25, 2020

Sponsored by IEEE Computer Society's Technical Commitee on Security and Privacy.

We are grateful for the support of: