EnCyCriS 2026

The 2026 International Workshop on Engineering and Cybersecurity of Critical Systems (EnCyCriS) will take place on Saturday Apr 18 in the Windsor Barra Hotel in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This marks the 7th edition of the EnCyCriS at the ICSE conference.

For industrial critical systems, although the previous premises of increasing system interconnectivity, decentralization, and introduction of new, more intelligent technologies still hold true, there is an increased societal awareness with regards to cybersecurity. This has led to clearer regulation, sharper requirements, and higher expectations for industry. At the same time, the availability of readily deployable competence, methods, tools, and solutions is lacking, which should be considered a critical societal risk.

In the current international political climate, cyber security, and safety of critical infrastructures across industry, are more important than ever before. The EnCyCriS workshop facilitates discourse and discussion amongst researchers, practitioners, and students who are working on challenges and solutions related to industrial critical infrastructure. It has a particular focus on sharing industry experience and project results pertaining to cyber threats on critical systems, secure systems engineering, and attack detection and response mechanisms.

Previous editions

• EnCyCriS 2025 was co-located with ICSE 2025 in Ottawa, Canada.
• EnCyCriS/SVM 2024 was co-located with ICSE 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
• EnCyCriS 2023 was co-located with ICSE 2023 in Melbourne, Australia.
• EnCyCriS 2022 was co-located with ICSE 2022 in Pittsburgh, USA.
• EnCyCriS 2021 was co-located with ICSE 2021 online.
• EnCyCriS 2020 was co-located with ICSE 2020 online.

Call for Papers

We are delighted to announce the 7th International Workshop on Engineering and Cybersecurity of Critical Systems (EnCyCriS), organized in conjunction with the 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026). The workshop will take place the day after the main ICSE conference, on Saturday Apr 18 in the Windsor Barra Hotel in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

EnCyCriS offers an opportunity for the sharing of thoughts and experiences between researchers, practitioners, and students in the domain of the engineering and cybersecurity of critical software-based systems and infrastructures. Submissions may consider the following topics:

• Integrated safety and security software engineering processes and methods for critical infrastructures (CI).

• Secure development of critical software-based systems across the entire lifecycle

• Operational cybersecurity challenges related to the introduction of novel technologies in CI, including evaluating effectiveness of risk models, detection and response tools, and methods.

• Human factors with respect to knowledge, preparedness and how to operationalize cyberattack response for CI, covering both technical and organizational factors.

• Safety and security assessment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools and methods in the life cycle processes of critical software-based systems.

• The use and effectiveness of tools and methods for improving CI, including but not limited to digital twins, AI, ML, Hardware In-the-Loop test beds.

• Operational challenges and solutions in planning for , detecting, understanding and mitigating cyberattacks

• Industry experiences and projects in the areas of cybersecurity of critical software-based systems; secure software engineering; cyber-attack detection and response mechanisms.

This workshop highly values experience and lessons learned from industry, and academic papers where research projects have been applied in an industrial context.

Submission

Deadline extended to November 2nd – There will be no more extension.

We accept research, position papers and industrial papers in different categories:

• full papers (8 pages max)

• extended abstracts (5 pages max)

All page limits include all figures, tables, and references. It is not possible to buy extra pages.

Please submit your work to the HotCrp EnCyCriS site, https://icse2026-encycris.hotcrp.com. All submissions must follow the official ACM Primary Article Template. You can find the template on the ACM Proceedings Template Page. If you are a LaTeX user, please use \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart} in the preamble of the main file. Workshop proceedings will be prepared by IEEE CPS and published in the ACM Digital Library and IEEE eXplore Digital Library.

Extended abstracts will be free of Article Processing Charges (APCs) as per the new ACM policies for open-access publishing. Full papers will not.

If a submission is accepted, at least one author must register for the EnCyCriS workshop and present the work.