VehicleSec '27 Preliminary Call for Papers | USENIX

Sponsored by USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association.
The 5th USENIX Symposium on Vehicle Security and Privacy (VehicleSec '27) will take place on August 9–10, 2027, and is co-located with the 36th USENIX Security Symposium in Denver, CO, USA.
A vehicle is a machine that transports people and/or goods in one or more physical domains, such as on the ground (e.g., cars, bicycles, motorcycles, trucks, buses, scooters, trains), in the air (e.g., drones, airplanes, helicopters), in the water (e.g., ships, submarine), and in space (e.g., spacecraft). Due to their safety and mission-critical nature, the security and privacy of vehicles can pose direct threats to passengers, owners, operators, and the infrastructure. Recent improvements in vehicle autonomy and connectivity (e.g., autonomous driving, uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, intelligent transportation systems, swarm robotics, and small satellites) have also served to exacerbate security and privacy challenges and thus require urgent attention from academia, industry, and policy-makers. To meet this critical need, VehicleSec aims to bring together an audience of university researchers, scientists, industry professionals, and government representatives to contribute new theories, technologies, and systems on any security/privacy issues related to vehicles (e.g., ground, aerial, in/on water, space), their sub-systems (e.g., in-vehicle networks, autonomy, connectivity, human-machine interfaces), supporting infrastructures (e.g., transportation infrastructure, charging station, ground control station), and related fundamental technologies (e.g., sensing, control, AI/ML/DNN/LLM, wireless communication, real-time computing, edge computing, location service, simulation, digital twin, multi-agent protocol/system design, and human-machine interaction).
VehicleSec will feature a demo/poster session to allow academic, governmental, and industry participants to share demonstrations and/or present posters of their latest practical attacks, defenses, and security/privacy tools or systems related to vehicles.
The symposium will also feature a tutorial session with an in-depth learning experience on one or more state-of-the-art topics in vehicle privacy and security presented by researchers or practitioners within the field. A tutorial should focus on its topic in detail and include references to the "must-read" papers or materials within its domain. Tutorials in which participants actively engage in exercises or hands-on work are particularly welcome. We encourage tutorials to include hands-on elements, live demonstrations, or interactive discussions. Each tutorial will be allocated a one-hour slot. Proposals should clearly indicate the format of the tutorial, prerequisites for participating in the tutorial (e.g., background knowledge, program languages), required materials (e.g., hardware, datasets, virtual machine images, wifi access), including (if any) material provided by the applicant (e.g., hardware, documentation).
The symposium will feature a Lightning Talks session with short and engaging 5-minute in-person presentations on any topics that can be worth a timely shout-out to the VehicleSec community, which include but are not limited to emerging hot topics, preliminary research results, practical problems encountered, lessons learned, the introduction of tutorials and education materials, tips and tricks, simulators/simulations, data and visualizations (e.g., autonomous driving datasets), or other (interdisciplinary) topics related to vehicles.
Accepted papers and demos will be considered for Best Paper Award and Best Demo Award. Accepted artifacts will be considered for the Distinguished Artifact Award.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
We expect authors to carefully consider and address the potential harms associated with carrying out their research, as well as the potential negative consequences that could stem from publishing their work. Failure to do so may result in the rejection of a submission regardless of its quality and scientific value. Where relevant, papers should include a clear statement about why the benefit of the research outweighs the harms and how the authors have taken measures and followed best practices to ensure safety and minimize the potential harms caused by their research. This includes but is not limited to, considering the impact of your research on deployed systems, understanding the costs your research imposes on others, safely and appropriately collecting data, and following responsible disclosure. Authors may wish to consult the USENIX Security '27 Ethics Guidelines.
If your submitted document relates to human subjects, analyzes data derived from human subjects, may put humans at risk, or might have other ethical implications or introduce legal issues of potential concern to the VehicleSec community, authors should disclose if an ethics review (e.g., IRB approval) was conducted, and discuss in the paper how ethical and legal concerns were addressed.
If your submitted document reports a potentially high-impact vulnerability, the authors should discuss in detail the steps they have already taken or plan to take to address these vulnerabilities (e.g., by disclosing vulnerabilities to the vendors). The chairs will contact the authors in case of concerns. The Program Committee reserves the right to reject a submission if insufficient evidence was presented that ethical or relevant legal concerns were appropriately addressed.
Authors and Program Committee members are required to indicate any conflict of interest and its nature. Advisors and those that they are advising, as well as authors and PC members with an institutional relationship, are considered to share a conflict of interest. Professional collaborations (irrespective of whether they resulted in publication or funding) that occurred in the past two years and close personal relationships