Call for Participation
See the original Call for Participation.
The Learning from Authoritative Security Experiment Results (LASER) Workshop will be held on Tuesday, December 8, 2026, in conjunction with the IEEE Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (IEEE ACSAC).
The LASER workshop series focuses on learning from and improving cybersecurity experiment results. The workshop strives to provide a highly interactive, collegial environment for discussing and learning from experimental methodologies, execution, and results. Ultimately, the workshop seeks to foster a dramatic change in the experimental paradigm for cybersecurity research, improving the overall quality and reporting of practiced science.
The LASER workshop welcomes broad participation from the cybersecurity community, including authors presenting the experimental aspects of their accepted IEEE ACSAC papers and others interested in contributing to and learning from the discussions. You do not need to be presenting a paper to participate!
Conference papers often emphasize results over experimentation details. LASER provides a forum to dig into approaches, design decisions, tools, datasets, and lessons learned, including what didn’t work on the way to success.
The workshop will feature eight selected presentations, with a keynote also planned. Sessions will be highly interactive, with authors guiding discussions around their experimental methodology, execution, and results.
Workshop Format
The workshop will be structured as a true “workshop,” emphasizing discussion and interaction on experimental methodologies, execution, and results, with the goal of improving experimental science in cybersecurity research. Authors will guide participants in exploring the experimental aspects of their work.
Topics of interest include (but aren’t limited to):
- Research questions and/or hypotheses
- Experimental methodologies and design
- Simulation, emulation, virtualization, and/or physical testbeds
- Specialized hardware (e.g., CPS, IoT)
- Modeling human behavior
- Tools used/developed for experimentation
- Validation, monitoring, and data collection
- Datasets used/developed
- Measurements, metrics, and analysis techniques
Discussion prompts include:
- Did you use artifacts borrowed from the community?
- Did you attempt to replicate or reproduce prior results?
- What can others learn from your methodology and experience?
- What approaches failed before the results you presented?
- Did you generate intermediate or negative results?
Presentations are expected to be interactive with a substantial amount of time devoted to questions and discussion.
How to Participate
Eight presentations have been selected from proposals submitted by authors of accepted IEEE ACSAC papers. Participation is open to everyone interested in cybersecurity experimentation, not just the selected presenters or authors of accepted ACSAC papers. Researchers, practitioners, students, and others are invited and encouraged to attend, learn from the presentations, ask questions, share their own experiences, and contribute to the discussions.
LASER is intended to be a highly interactive workshop where all participants can engage with presenters and one another to explore experimental approaches, challenges, successes, failures, and lessons learned. Whether you have extensive experience conducting cybersecurity experiments or are interested in learning from others, we welcome your participation.
All LASER participants, including presenters and non-presenting attendees, must register for the workshop through the IEEE ACSAC registration site. LASER-only registration is available for those who are not attending the main conference.
All workshop participants should be aware of the IEEE ACSAC AI Policy on Usage of LLMs. Although LASER does not solicit separate workshop papers, presenters are expected to follow the spirit of the policy in preparing their presentations.'
Further Information
Please see laser-workshop.github.io for information about past LASER Workshops. Send questions to balenson@isi.edu.