Rossfest Symposium in memory of Ross Anderson

Cambridge, UK – 25 March 2025

The Rossfest Symposium and its posthumous Festschrift is a celebration and remembrance of our friend and colleague Ross Anderson, who passed away suddenly on 28 March 2024, aged 67.

Ross Anderson FRS FRSE FREng was Professor of Security Engineering at the University of Cambridge and lately also at the University of Edinburgh. He was a world-leading figure in security. He had a gift for pulling together the relevant key people and opening up a new subfield of security research by convening a workshop on the topic that would then go on to become an established series, from Fast Software Encryption to Information Hiding, Scrambling for Safety, Workshop on Economics and Information Security, Security and Human Behavior and so forth. He co-authored around 300 papers. His encyclopedic Security Engineering textbook (well over 1000 pages) is dense with both war stories and references to research papers. An inspiring and encouraging supervisor, Ross graduated around thirty PhD students. And as a contagiously enthusiastic public speaker he inspired thousands of researchers around the world.

The Rossfest Symposium is an opportunity for all of us who were touched by Ross to get together and celebrate his legacy.

The Festschrift volume

Scientific papers

We solicit scientific contributions to a posthumous Festschrift volume, in the form of short, punchy papers on any security-related topic. These submissions will undergo a lightweight review process by a Program Committee composed of former PhD students of Ross:

Accepted papers will be published in the Festschrift book and presented at the event. For a subset of the accepted papers, the authors will be invited to submit an expanded version to a special issue of the Journal of Cybersecurity honouring Ross’s scholarly contributions and legacy.

Bound copies of the Festschrift volume will be available to purchase at cost during the Rossfest Symposium, or later through print-on-demand. A DRM-free PDF will be available online from this page at no charge.

Informal memories

We also solicit informal “cherished memories” contributions along the lines of those collected by Ahn Vu at anderson.love. These too will be collected in the volume and a selection of them will be presented orally at the event.

The Rossfest Symposium

The Rossfest Symposium will take place on Tuesday 25 March 2025 at the Computer Laboratory (a.k.a. the Department of Computer Science and Technology of the University of Cambridge), where Ross taught, researched and originally obtained his own PhD. Street address: 15 JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK.

Attendance at the Rossfest Symposium is free and not conditional on the submission of a contribution, but registration will be required for us to manage numbers and catering.

In the evening there shall also be a formal celebration banquet at Trinity College Cambridge, where Ross studied as an undergraduate. To attend, please purchase a ticket. The cost, currently unknown, might be in the region of 100 GBP. Registration and payment links shall appear on this page in due course. Street address: Trinity Street, Cambridge CB2 1TQ, UK.

We have timed the Rossfest to be adjacent in time and space to the Security Protocols Workshop, an event that Ross regularly attended. The SPW will take place in Trinity College Cambridge on 26 and 27 March 2025. This will allow you to attend both events with a single trip to Cambridge. Note that attendance at SPW requires presenting a position paper: unlike the Rossfest, at SPW all attendees must also speak.

Accommodation in Cambridge

The chosen dates are out of term, meaning you might be able to book a room in one of the 31 colleges through www.universityrooms.com. Otherwise, consider www.airbnb.com, www.booking.com, www.expedia.com or your favourite online booking aggregator.

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Submission

To be considered for inclusion in the volume, scientific paper contributions must be submitted via the Microsoft Conference Management Toolkit.

Submissions are limited to five pages in LNCS format excluding bibliography and any appendices, and maximum eight pages total. Let’s keep it snappy, as Ross himself would have liked.

Topic-wise, anything related to security, taking the word in its broadest sense, is fair game, from cryptography and systems to economics, psychology, policy and much more, spanning the wide spectrum of fields that Ross himself explored over the course of his career. But make it a scientific contribution rather than just an opinion piece.

Authors will grant us a licence to publish and distribute their articles in the Festschrift but will retain copyright and will be able to put their articles on their web pages or resubmit them wherever else they like. We won’t ask for article charges for publishing in the Festschrift.

Informal “cherished memories” contributions are limited to one page in LCNS format and must clearly be identified as such in the submission form.

All submissions will undergo a lightweight peer review process, resulting in a boolean verdict (accept/reject) but not reviews or grades. Program Committee decisions are final and no correspondence will be entered into.

Please prepare your submission using LaTeX (MS Word not accepted ) and the latest Springer LNCS class. Submit only a single PDF in the first instance. Once you receive an acceptance letter, you will then be asked for the LaTeX source.

Submit

Dates

Date(s) Significance
25 November 2024 Deadline for submission of Festschrift articles
23 December 2024 Invitations to authors to present orally
13 January 2025 Early bird (discounted) registration deadline for banquet
10 February 2025 Final registration deadline for banquet and symposium
25 March 2025 Rossfest Symposium (and optional banquet)
26-27 March 2025 Security Protocols Workshop (unrelated but possibly of interest)