OPTIMIST Workshop '26

October 11, 2026 Antalya, Turkey​

OPTIMIST is a forum for open, reproducible, and community-driven work in implementation security. We aim to make security evaluation more measurable, reusable, and comparable by gathering researchers, practitioners, tool developers, dataset creators, evaluators, and standardization stakeholders in a single forum.

📢 Call for Contributions​

OPTIMIST considers open contributions in implementation security across the physical, microarchitectural, hardware, firmware, software, and system-level spectrum. This includes, for example, reproducible evaluation, interoperable workflows, open benchmarks, AI-enabled security methods, implementation security of AI systems, and post-quantum cryptography implementations.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Open datasets for evaluation of implementation security testing methods, including methods to find sidechannel leakage and fault vulnerabilities at various abstraction levels, especially in new cryptographic standards and AI implementations;
• Open-source tools for measurement, analysis, verification, simulation, benchmarking, reverse engineering, artifact evaluation, and AI-enabled implementation-security workflows;
• Reference implementations in hardware and software, firmware libraries, AI accelerators, test platforms for reproducible security evaluation;
• Specifications, APIs, hardware interfaces, data formats, and documentation practices that support interoperable and reproducible security evaluation workflows;
• Standardization, certification, and benchmark-development efforts for implementation security evaluation;
• Case studies, demonstrations, and lessons learned from using open datasets, tools, platforms, specifications, or implementations;

OPTIMIST supports two presentation formats for accepted contributions.

• Talks and demos. 15-minute presentations or demos on one of the topics of interest listed above.
• Interactive discussions. 15-minute moderated sessions seeking feedback on, e.g., an open issue, proposed direction, specifications, or community need where discussion is the main goal rather than presentation of completed work.

✅ Selection Criteria​

The program committee will select contributions based on fit with OPTIMIST and their potential to stimulate useful discussion among OPTIMIST attendees. Submissions will be evaluated based on one or more of the following criteria:

• Relevance to open and reproducible implementation security;
• Availability of open-source implementation;
• Clarity of the artifact, dataset, tool, interface, specification, or methodology;
• Potential to support comparison, benchmarking, reuse, or standardization;
• Quality of documentation, reproducibility support, and stated assumptions;
• Potential to stimulate discussion, collaboration, or community coordination;

📩 Submission Format​

OPTIMIST welcomes archival and non-archival contributions. Each submission should clearly describe what will be presented and why it is relevant to OPTIMIST.

• For artifact submissions, authors should describe the artifact’s purpose, expected users, setup requirements, assumptions, limitations, and availability.
• For datasets, authors should additionally describe the collection procedure, metadata, intended use, known limitations, and possible evaluation tasks.
• For tools, authors should further describe the supported workflow, inputs and outputs, interfaces, reproducibility support, and comparison with related tools.

Submissions will undergo double-blind review. Submissions can use Anonymous Github for easy blinding of author names on existing repositories. After acceptance, authors may update the submission to include public, non-anonymous artifact links. Submissions should follow Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science format and may be up to 5 pages, including references. Accepted contributions will be bundled and made available on the OPTIMIST website.

🤓 Organizers​

• Aydin Aysu (North Carolina State University)
• Fatemeh Ganji (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)
• Patrick Schaumont (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)

😎 Technical Program Committee​

TBA

📅 Timeline​

• June 21, 2026 — Submission deadline
• July 15, 2026 — Acceptance Notifications
• August 1, 2026 — Program Announcement