Scope and Motivation

The large-scale use of data in many areas, including in machine learning, bring new challenges to security and privacy. This data is increasingly sensitive as it could relate to personal data, but without its use, building modern-scale learning models is difficult. Though security and privacy have a long history, the scale and types of data and its uses give rise to several new theoretical and algorithmic questions. Information theory gives a rigorous framework for powerful security and privacy guarantees without computational assumptions. Ideas from information theory have influenced developments in cryptography and privacy, and many of these ideas are starting to be deployed at wide-scale. Information theory not only can give guarantees, it also suggests secure/private algorithms, as well as gives a framework to understand important tradeoffs, such as in performance versus security/privacy and other constraints (such as communication).

Given the rapid recent developments of ideas in security and privacy, and its importance in modern day information systems, this special issue explores the recent developments in security and privacy from an information theoretic perspective. The goal of this special issue is not only to capture the recent exciting developments but also attempt to frame important research questions in these domains for the coming years. Therefore we invite expository articles on the following topics of interest (not a comprehensive or exclusive list):

• Secure interactive (multi-party) communication and computation
• Information theoretic bounds and analysis for differential privacy
• Privacy and personalization
• Security and privacy for distributed and federated learning
• Auditing: privacy and security
• Security, privacy, safety and alignment in large-language models
• High-dimensional robust statistics and robust learning
• Secure and private online learning
• Security and privacy in sensing and cyber-physical systems
• Theoretical foundations for trusted execution environments
• Decentralized trust and blockchains
• Quantum cryptography
• Post-quantum cryptography

Full Call for Papers
The full call for papers is available at the BITS website.

BITS Submission Instructions
We will follow the BITS two-stage submission process outlined below and described in BITS Information for Authors at www.itsoc.org/bits/information-authors

Revised Relevant Dates
White paper submission: June 10, 2024
Manuscript invitation: June 30, 2024
Manuscript submission: Aug 15, 2024
Manuscript reviews: September 20, 2024
Manuscript final version: December 15, 2024
Special Issue publication: December 2024