VSC track brings the opportunity for researchers and developers from industry and the academic world to report the state of the art and exchange ideas on correctness, confidentiality, security, privacy and reliability of software technologies. The idea is to foster research and development for the advanced support needed to enhance the level of quality and of user trust on services holding personal data and involving collaboration with unknown remote parties.

Nowadays, the widespread use of smart devices, such as smart cards, watches, phones, and tablets, connected by the ubiquitous public Internet network, enables us to easily access a vast range of useful services. Distributed technologies such as blockchains have emerged to foster collaboration and data preservation. Such devices and infrastructures allow people to perform every day activities that either play a role in a collaborative task or are actually supported by some real-time or asynchronous collaboration technology. Example services and applications include the monitoring of health-related functions, messaging, the trading of goods, remote writing or signing of digital documents, activities on social networks or work groups, remotely locating someone/something, and even services improving our ability to observe/control the environment around us. In this context, applications that hold or exchange sensitive user data, like personal details, security pin-codes, or biometric data, need special protection against software failures or malicious behaviour of downloaded code, that may expose the user to highly undesired consequences, such as threats to confidentiality and even financial or health danger.

The trend is indeed towards integration, that is, not to have many specialized access devices but a single, multi-purpose host handling many (or all) kinds of user services and its related data together, even though with limited computing resources. Moreover, inherent mobility and distribution of these small, open computing devices increases the complexity of the solutions to be adopted for handling secure and reliable execution of untrusted code, in order to ensure the data confidentiality strongly required by the applications. As a consequence, new and specially designed techniques can be devised and applied in order to reach the goal of increasing the trust on such a distributed computing environment to a level of strength matching with the high strength of the above safety critical requirements.

• Verification techniques
• Novel testing and validation algorithms
• Dependability assessment techniques
• Model-based validation and testing techniques for security and privacy
• Analysis of threats and countermeasures to the security of smart devices
• Blockchain analysis tailored to security and privacy
• Static and run-time techniques for byte-code verification and validation
• Validation testing of safety critical technologies
• Validation of large-scale distributed applications
• Software testing in multi-core environments
• Risk-based approaches to software validation
• Assessing security and robustness of applications
• Software architectures for securing software on collaboration devices
• Static code analysis tailored to security and privacy for iOS and Android
• Performance analysis of security-related features
• Performance and QoS testing
• Testing and analysis tools
• Security and Privacy in Cyber-Physical Systems
• Cyber Insurance

Papers should contain original contributions not published or submitted elsewhere, and references to related state-of-the art work. Please submit your papers in PDF format. Make sure that the maximum size of your paper is 6 pages for full papers and 4 pages for short papers. There are no extra pages allowed. Authors of accepted papers are expected to present their papers at the conference.

Papers should follow the IEEE conference format, which is single-spaced, two columns, 10pt Times/Roman font. Papers should include a title, the name and affiliation of each author, an abstract of up to 150 words and no more than eight keywords.

Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings, and will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press, indexed by Scopus, Google Scholar, etc.

If you have further questions or remarks, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers. Submission is through the EasyChair system https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wetice2021, please select Track: Validating Software for Critical Systems.

WETICE is an annual IEEE International conference on state-of-the-art research in enabling technologies for collaboration, consisting of a number of cognate conference tracks. The Proceedings are published by the IEEE CS Press and distributed at the conference. All published papers are refereed by the Scientific Review of Committee of each conference track. What sets WETICE apart from larger conferences is that the conference tracks are kept small enough to promote fruitful discussions on the latest technology developments, directions, problems, and requirements. Each track includes paper presentations and group discussions while the keynote sessions and summary of discussions take place in joint sessions.