CRITIS 2025 continues the tradition of bringing forth innovative research in the field of critical information infrastructure protection C(I)IP, exploring ideas that address challenges to resilience and societal safety & security, and fostering dialogue with stakeholders.

CRITIS 2025 welcomes, especially but not limited to, research topics focusing on information exchange security and securing information infrastructures in various ways; also, topics related to hybrid threats and critical information infrastructure security are encouraged. Furthermore, in 2025, papers focusing on human and strategic aspects of C(I)IP are most welcome in a special socio-technical track.

Moreover, CRITIS 2025 will also focus on critical infrastructure protection in general and in the context of C(I)IP. Papers, testbeds, datasets reports, and industrial/practical experience reports are especially welcome.

CRITIS 2025 Topics

Topics for CRITIS 2025 include, but are not limited to:

• Protection of Cyber-Physical/Cyber-Physical Human Systems and Industrial Control Systems
• Analytics, Strategic Management, (C(I)IP Organization)
• Continuity Planning
• Privacy issues related to C(I)IP
• Security Awareness & Crisis Management for C(I)IP, Human Factors and Critical Services
• Future, TechWatch & Forecast for C(I)IP and Services Oriented Approaches, Explainable AI and Digital Twins
• Safety & Security: Complex Vulnerability Analysis
• Intelligence Analysis & Quantum Intelligence
• Legal Aspects and Ethical Perspectives
• Climate change implications in Critical Infrastructures and services
• Natural Threats to Critical Infrastructures

Young CRITIS Award

Following the tradition of the previous years, CRITIS will continue to award the best work presented by young scientists who have excelled in their work. To promote and support young researchers working in CIP, we will provide a grant for the best young researcher paper on critical infrastructure protection. Who should apply? Every young engineer/scientist interested in CRITIS who is less than 32 years old by December 31st, 2025, is invited to apply. We explicitly invite junior experts and researchers from universities, research organizations, and industry to apply. 

Applications instructions:

• Mark your submission as a YCA applicant when submitting your paper.
• Inform the General Chair of your application for YCA by sending an e-mail with the subject “YCA Application”. In the e-mail, you have to specify the submission number(s) of your paper(s) and send your CV and the Young CRITIS Award questionnaire properly filled out as attachments.

The deadline for the application is September 21st, 2025. If you do not get an acknowledgment of receipt, please try to resend in order to exclude transfer problems.

Paper Submission & Guidelines

All contributions must be submitted via EasyChair (See dates and links on the right). As per tradition, papers designated as a “full paper” will be included in the post-proceedings published in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

Regular paper submission guidelines

The following two paper categories are welcome. Any submission must be explicitly marked as “full paper” or “short paper”.

• Full papers – scientific research papers, surveying works and industrial experiences describing significant C(I)IP advances. Papers should be no longer than 20 pages, including bibliography and well‐marked appendices. These submissions correspond to what was previously indicated as “regular papers” in the call for papers.
• Short papers – early results or work in progress with initial findings. Papers should be 4 to 6 pages long, including bibliography and well‐marked appendices. These submissions correspond to what was previously indicated as “ongoing research” in the call for papers. Short papers will be presented as posters and they will NOT be included in the post-proceedings published in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. All paper submissions must contain a title, a short abstract, and a list of keywords. All submissions will be subjected to a thorough double‐blind review by at least three reviewers. Submitted papers shall be anonymized, and all author names, affiliations, acknowledgements, and obvious traceable references should be eliminated to be eligible for the review process.

Submission

Submitted manuscripts should represent significant and novel research contributions. All manuscripts will have to be submitted in anonymized form for double-blind review. To that effect:

• The title page should not contain any author names or affiliations.
• Authors should carefully review figures and appendices (especially survey instruments) to ensure affiliations are not accidentally included.
• When referring to your previous work, do so in the third person, as though it were written by someone else. Only blind the reference itself in the (unusual) case that a third-person reference is infeasible.
• Authors may include links to websites that contain source code, tools, or other supplemental material. Neither the link in the paper nor the website or any of the materials therein may contain the authors’ names and affiliations.

Papers that are not properly anonymized may be rejected without review. While submitted papers must be anonymous, authors may choose to give talks about their work, post a preprint of the paper online, disclose security vulnerabilities to vendors or the public, etc. during the review process. Submissions should be made according to the Springer LNCS format. For optimization reasons, authors are encouraged to use the following LaTeX Proceedings Templates, available in the platform Overleaf. For detailed guidelines, please refer to the official Guidelines for Authors of Papers to be Published in Springer Computer Science Proceedings. Kindly note that we prefer the use of American English. Maximum length of text abstracts: 180 words.