The 17th EAI International Conference on Digital Forensics & Cyber Crime (ICDF2C 2026) will take place in Reykjavik, Iceland, 8 - 10 September, 2026. Proceedings published by Springer.

Deadline for workshop (/tutorial/doctoral consortium) proposals: 5 December, 2025

Poster and Demo submission deadline: 30th of March, 2026.

For further details, check the conference web page.

Video introducing ICDF2C 2026 in Reykjavik, Iceland - Click to play

CALL FOR PAPERS

EAI ICDF2C 2026: 17th EAI International Conference on Digital Forensics & Cyber Crime

https://icdf2c.eai-conferences.org/2026/

When: 8 - 10 September, 2026

Where: Reykjavík, Iceland


Deadline for workshop (/tutorial/doctoral consortium) proposals: 5 December, 2025

Notification of workshop (/tutorial/doctoral consortium) proposal acceptance: 10 December, 2025

Paper submission deadline: 20th January, 2026

Paper notification deadline: 25th April, 2026

Paper camera-ready deadline: 15th May, 2026

Poster and Demo submission</a> deadline: 30th of March, 2026.

Scope

The 17th EAI International Conference on Digital Forensics & Cyber
Crime (ICDF2C) will be held on 8-10 September, 2026, in Reykjavik
(Iceland). This three-day event is expected to attract well over 100
participants, including academics, practitioners, criminologists (or
law enforcement) and vendors, providing business and intellectual
engagement opportunities among attendees. The conference is organized
by the European Alliance for Innovation (EAI).

This conference's theme is cyber analytics and forensics in the era of
emerging threats. Novel cyber threats are continuously emerging,
catalysed by the rapid deployment of Large Language ModelI and other
AI across many domains which increases the threat surface in many
sectors such as Smart Industry, Fintech and digital government. The
focus of this conference is to provide a platform for discussing these
emerging threats and to identify priorities for the community to
target with the next generation of cyber analytics. We particularly
welcome research which studies the dynamics between human factors and
AI technologies and the corresponding impact upon cybersecurity and
forensics.

Potential workshops (/tutorials) may include: doctoral consortium for 
PhD students, password cracking for forensics, forensic education, 
forensic applications of AI, responding to an incident from a police 
or corporate interaction perspective, including what to expect when 
you involve law enforcement.

We encourage the authors to use the Posters and Demos venue as a way to 
open up discussions with the ICDF2C community about their early work in 
progress and develop the work for future collaborations. 
Representatives from industry, including established companies and startups, 
are warmly welcome to showcase products and services that are related to the 
topics of the conference.

***

Publication

All registered papers will be submitted for publishing by Springer –
LNICST series and made available through SpringerLink Digital Library:
ICDF2C proceedings.

Proceedings will be submitted for inclusion in leading indexing
services, such as Web of Science, Compendex, Scopus, DBLP, EU Digital
Library, IO-Port, MatchSciNet, Inspec and Zentralblatt MATH.

All accepted authors are eligible to submit an extended version in a fast track of:
- EAI Endorsed Transactions on Security and Safety
- EAI Endorsed Transactions on Internet of Things

***

Topics

Theme: Cyber analytics and forensics in the era of emerging threats.

Applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and other related technologies:
- Anti-forensics and anti-anti-forensics (e.g., deepfake)
- Deep learning
- Explainable AI (XAI)
- Generative AI (GenAI)
- Large language model (LLM)

Device forensics:
- Blockchain investigations
- Internet of Things (IoT) forensics 
 (including industrial IoT, medical IoT, military IoT, battlefield IoT, and vehicular IoT)
- Edge and/or cloud forensics
- Network and distributed system forensics
- Virtual / augmented reality (VR/AR) forensics
- Other emerging / contemporary technologies 
 (e.g., hardware and software such as firmware and operating systems)

Financial crime investigations:
- Financial frauds and scams
- Cryptocurrency investigations
- Market manipulation investigations
- Anti-money laundering / counter terrorism financing investigations
- Anti-corruption investigations

Cyber security and analytics:
- Network security (e.g., intrusion detection)
- Malware analysis
- IoT security
- Security operations center
- Virtual / augmented reality (VR/AR)

Education and Evaluation:
- Case studies – legal (e.g., child sexual abuse material) and/or technical
- Infrastructure
- Methodology
- Replicability and validity
- Tool validation

Theory and fundamentals:
- Anti-forensics and anti-anti-forensics (e.g., encryption and deepfake)
- Frameworks (legal, policy, and/or technical)
- Privacy-preserving forensics
- Social and privacy
- Steganography and steganalysis
- Visualization methods and tools for forensic analysis

***

General Chairs
Helmut Neukirchen - University of Iceland, Iceland
Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo - University of Texas at San Antonio, USA

Technical Program Committee Chairs
Thomas Welsh - University of Iceland, Iceland
Hans P. Reiser - Reykjavík University, Iceland
Raymond Chan - Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore

***

This event is organized by EAI https://eai.eu/

EAI – European Alliance for Innovation is a non-profit organization
and a professional community established in cooperation with the
European Commission to empower the global research and innovation, and
to promote cooperation between European and International ICT
communities. 

We have two research papers accepted: one at the 3rd International Conference on Foundation and Large Language Models (FLLM2025) and one at the 12th IEEE International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (SNAMS-2025) -- both conferences are co-located, saving CO2 footprint as only one presenter needs to fly to Vienna in order to present both papers.

• Adetayo Adebimpe, Helmut Neukirchen, Thomas Welsh
  SBASH: a Framework for Designing and Evaluating RAG vs. Prompt-Tuned LLM Honeypots.
  The 3rd International Conference on Foundation and Large Language Models (FLLM2025), IEEE, to appear 2025.
  Download Postprint DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2510.21459
• Thomas Welsh, Kristófer Finnsson, Brynjólfur Stefánsson, Helmut Neukirchen
  Towards Socio-Technical Topology-Aware Adaptive Threat Detection in Software Supply Chains.
  The 12 International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (SNAMS 2025), IEEE, to appear 2025.
  Download Postprint DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2510.21452

This research is in the context of our cybersecurity activities and the ECCC/EU co-funded projects ICEDEF – Defend Iceland and Eyvör – the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre of Iceland (NCC-IS).

I just stumbled over the 2024 Icelandic Developer Survey: Compensation, Technologies, and more that was based asking members of an Icelandic SW developer Facebook group to fill out a survey.

Having been involved in other IT-related survey's in Iceland (e.g.: The state of cybersecurity vulnerability reporting in Iceland), this is interesting work.

If page limit is an issue for you as an author of a scientific paper, then shortening references may be a way to squeeze out a few lines, e.g. using in the references section IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. instead of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

This is based on the ISO 4 standard: Words such as articles (the), conjunctions (and), and prepositions (for/of/in) are generally removed and a List of Title Word Abbreviations (LTWA) is used to abbreviate common title words.

You can look up the words in the LTWA at https://www.issn.org/services/online-services/access-to-the-ltwa/.

However, that list seems not be exhaustive: I have seen journals themselves using abbreviations not contained in the LTWA.

It therefore helps to search also for the full name and add as search term iso 4 or to check whether there is a Wikipedia article that contains the ISO 4 abbreviation or to look up the journal at https://www.resurchify.com/impact/details/ or at https://paperpile.com/guides/resources/abbreviations/

On Saturday, 27. September 2024, 12:00-17:00, there was Vísindavaka 2025, the Icelandic family-friendly-during-daytime edition of European Researchers' Night 2026 at Laugardalshöll in Reykjavik.

The Computer Science department of University of Iceland had a couple of booths there, showcasing our activities in a way accessible for the general public.

Gagnabær ("Datatown") digital twin that visualises cyber attacks in Iceland. A LEGO model of Iceland representing critical infrastructure that is subject to attacks. Each time, a service on our Internet-connected computer is attacked via the Internet from anywhere in the world, a light goes off. So when all Iceland turns dark in our Lego model, then you know that all of our services are currently being attacked at the same time. We use just a dummy sample server, but in fact, it could be your computer or a power plant that is attacked. This relates to ICEDEF – Defend Iceland and Eyvör – the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre of Iceland (NCC-IS).

AI trained on a supercomputer, but running locally in the browser of your smartphone.

The European Digital Innovation Hub Iceland (EDIH-IS) and the EuroCC co-funded National Competence Center (NCC) Icelandic High-Performance Computing (IHPC) provide give a glimpse into artificial intelligence by using a neural network that runs purely in your browser without any connection to a super computer. Simply use the camera of your smartphone (or laptop) to detect objects in real-time -- just open the following web page and allow your browser to use the camera: https://uice.is The used approach is a Single Shot Detector (SSD) (the percentage shows how sure the neural network is about the classification) using the Mobilenet neural network architecture. The dataset used for training is COCO (Common Objects in Context), i.e. only objects of the labeled object classes contained in COCO will get detected. The Javascript code that is running in your browser uses Tensorflow Lite and its Object Detection API and model zoo.

Another application of object detection (combined with object tracking): the organisers of the European Researcher's Night asked me to count the number of visitors by having a camera at the entrance that counts people entering and exiting. This was not showcased at a booth, but ran GDPR compliant (counting was done in real time and no video was recorded) in the background. As the camera was low resolution, the software had however some issues and was more reliable in counting people exiting than entering. Anecdotal evidence suggest, that children were not counted as these were simply too few pixels to be detected. It remains to be found out whether a higher resolution camera would improve the situation.

Beat the AI! A remote sensing demonstration that relates also to work done in EDIH-IS and IHPC where neural networks are used to classify land cover from satellite images, (Photo from Vísindavaka 2022)

In addition, we will have a booth on quantum computing -- this relates to our quantum encryption education activities as part of ICEDEF – Defend Iceland and Eyvör – the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre of Iceland (NCC-IS), but also to EDIH-IS and IHPC as quantum computing might be the future of supercomputing.

Our booths at the previous European Researchers' Nights:

• European Researchers' Night 2024 / Vísindavaka 2024
• European Researchers' Night 2023 / Vísindavaka 2023
• European Researchers' Night 2022 / Vísindavaka 2022
• No 2020 nor 2021 European Researchers' Nights due to COVID pandemic
• European Researchers' Night 2019 / Vísindavaka 2019

Parts of this event are in the context of our cybersecurity activities and the ECCC/EU co-funded projects ICEDEF – Defend Iceland and Eyvör – the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre of Iceland (NCC-IS).

While I am teaching to use AI coding assistants (and emphasize the pros and cons, in particular that it helps only if you have enough knowledge to judge whether the output is correct or pure hallucination), there have been recently two studies published that give an indication that AI coding assistants do actually decrease productivity:

• Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
• Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up

One aspect is that developers learn over time about the project that they are working on whereas LLMs have been trained once and will always start from scratch in a project where they are used as coding assistants.

A personal idea for future research: as there have been reports about AI slob (e.g. AI generates low-quality documents that get distributed and then take time to read and therefore, this reduces in the end productivity), it might be worthwhile to measure the impact of AI coding assistants on maintainability: if AI coding assistance would produce code that is hard to maintain, then any gains by AI coding assistants might get eaten up in future when it comes to maintenance.

We presented an update on our cybersecurity activities to industry and students at the 21st Icelandic HPC Community Workshop August 28, 2025.

We covered there the joint MSc. programme in cybersecurity, our research, and the Digital Europe Programme projects Eyvör NCC-IS, the National Coordination Centre for Cybersecurity in Iceland and Defend Iceland, including the European network of NCCs and the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre (ECCC).

This event is in the context of our cybersecurity activities and the ECCC/EU co-funded projects ICEDEF – Defend Iceland and Eyvör – the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre of Iceland (NCC-IS).

The coalition agreement of the new Government that is forming aims at more digital surveillance (e.g. data retention in telecommunication, face and number plate recognition). While this is not good for privacy, at least IT security gets legal certainty:

In the Germany, there is the problem that IT security researchers who report vulnerabilities to companies (Responsible Disclosure) are sometimes sued by these companies based on a German legislation that was supposed to make breaking into IT systems a crime. I signed a petition of IT security researchers to change that legislation in order to prevent that Responsible Disclosure can be made a crime. The hope was that the currently forming government will change legislation and indeed:

The new coalition agreement covers cybersecurity at some places in an abstract manner and also includes the above legislative change:

Cyberstrafrecht, Deepfakes, Strafbarkeit Plattformbetreiber und Hackerparagraph
Wir reformieren das Cyberstrafrecht und schließen Strafbarkeitslücken, zum Beispiel bei bildbasierter sexualisierter Gewalt. Dabei erfassen wir auch Deep Fakes und schließen Lücken bei deren Zugänglichmachung gegenüber Dritten. Wir verschärfen die Sanktionsmöglichkeiten gegenüber Plattformen, insbesondere bei systemischen Mängeln bei der Entfernung strafbarer Inhalte. Wir werden im Computerstrafrecht Rechtssicherheit für IT-Sicherheitsforschung schaffen, wobei wir Missbrauchsmöglichkeiten verhindern.

Research trip/Vísindaferð is a visit to learn about companies (also as future employers) and to learn about the science behind the products that they develop. Often, these are organised by student associations as a social event.

This time, our student association Nörd visited not a company, but their teachers at the Computer Science department to learn about the research done there -- to get an idea of topics that they could do later as M.Sc. students.

I presented the following short slide deck on Software Engineering research area and the Cybersecurity M.Sc. specialisations.

Video showing the installation of a buoy: due the results of a student's M.Sc. thesis, the location can be obtained with centimeter precision and even without mobile phone coverage: an internet connection at the shore can be relayed via LoRaWAN several dozens of kilometers. Note that the linked video goes into archiving mode if it has not been viewed for two years.

The above video shows the results of the M.Sc. thesis Design and Implementation of a Buoy Positioning and Monitoring System Using Differential GNSS and LoRaWAN.

Marcel Aach defended yesterday successfully his PhD thesis on Parallel and Scalable Hyperparameter Optimization for Distributed Deep Learning Methods on High-Performance Computing Systems.

Marcel's research was rooted in the CoE RAISE project. This PhD is an example of the collaboration between the Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science and Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC).