Transparency is a means of providing enhanced security to systems by enabling auditors to hold system providers accountable to agreed-upon compliance policies. Cryptographic transparency allows for the auditing of certain classes of policies in an automated fashion with high assurance. Systems with cryptographic transparency have been deployed for a number of applications including Certificate Transparency for the web PKI, binary transparency for software supply chains, and key transparency for end-to-end encrypted messaging applications. The Workshop on Cryptography Applied to Transparency Systems (CATS) provides a venue to bring together industry practitioners with experience building and deploying transparency systems in practice, as well as researchers on new designs for next-generation transparency systems.

The first iteration of CATS solicits contributions for talk proposals to be considered for presentation at the workshop. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Design of components in existing transparency systems
  • Lessons learned from existing transparency system deployments
  • Emerging applications in which transparency systems may be applied
  • Authenticated data structures and cryptographic accumulators
  • Notions of privacy for transparency systems
  • Auditing mechanisms, consensus protocols, and consistency properties of transparency systems
  • Proof systems for data lookup and auditing
  • Usability considerations for transparency systems
  • Measurement studies of transparency systems in practice
  • Social and legal implications of transparency systems

Submission Instructions

Submissions must be in PDF format and must be non-anonymous. The goal of the submission is to convey to the committee the contents and quality of the proposed talk. As such, the speaker must be identified and must confirm that they plan to attend the workshop in-person. Due to logistic constraints, we will be requiring speakers to attend the workshop in-person this year. A submission requires a talk abstract, but can in total include:

  • A talk abstract (maximum two pages) [REQUIRED]
  • Expected presentation slides
  • Link to full paper
  • Link to past presentations by the speaker or past presentations on the topic

Submissions that violate any of the above rules run the risk of being desk rejected.

Submissions are due by September 1, 2023. Authors will be notified of decisions by September 29, 2023. The submission server is available here (hotcrp).

Conflicts of Interest

We will follow the conflict of interest policy as laid out for ACM CCS 2023.

Presentation Format

Contributed talks will be given a 20-minute talk slot at the workshop.

Important Dates

Deadline Date
Submissions due September 1, 2023
Acceptance notice to authors September 29, 2023
Program announced October 12, 2023
Workshop November 30, 2023