Conference Description
Key Takeaways
- Academic and industry conference focused on dependable and secure computing systems
- Covers hardware design, software engineering, network security, cloud computing, IoT security and AI-driven security solutions
- Designed for researchers, security engineers, system architects, cybersecurity analysts and technology leaders
- Features paper presentations, workshops and poster sessions
- Takes place October 9–11, 2026 in New York City
Introduction
The 2026 IEEE Conference on Dependable and Secure Computing (DSC) convenes researchers, practitioners and industry leaders to examine the evolving challenges of building computing systems that remain both reliable and resistant to attack. Scheduled for October 2026 in New York City, the conference addresses a domain where system failures and security breaches carry increasingly severe consequences across critical infrastructure, enterprise operations and emerging technology deployments.
As organisations accelerate their adoption of cloud architectures, IoT deployments and AI-powered systems, the traditional boundaries between security and dependability have blurred. A system that cannot be trusted to operate correctly under adversarial conditions fails both criteria simultaneously. This conference sits at that intersection, bringing together foundational research and practical implementation strategies.
About the IEEE DSC Conference
The IEEE Conference on Dependable and Secure Computing serves as a venue for presenting peer-reviewed research alongside industry perspectives on trustworthy computing technologies. The programme encompasses paper presentations, workshops and poster sessions, creating multiple formats for knowledge exchange between academic researchers and practitioners working on production systems.
The conference emphasises both theoretical foundations and applied research, recognising that advances in secure and dependable computing require rigorous analysis methods as well as validated deployment approaches. This dual focus distinguishes the event from purely academic symposia or vendor-driven technology showcases.
Technical Focus Areas
The conference programme spans multiple layers of the computing stack, from hardware design through to distributed system architectures. Hardware security sessions examine how physical design choices affect system trustworthiness, including side-channel vulnerabilities and secure processor architectures. Software engineering tracks address secure development practices, formal verification methods and techniques for building reliability into complex codebases.
Network security remains a core theme, particularly as perimeter-based models give way to zero-trust architectures and software-defined networking introduces new attack surfaces. Cloud computing sessions explore the specific challenges of maintaining dependability guarantees in multi-tenant environments where traditional isolation assumptions may not hold.
IoT security has become increasingly urgent as connected devices proliferate across industrial, healthcare and consumer environments. These systems often operate with constrained computational resources, limited update mechanisms and extended deployment lifetimes—conditions that complicate conventional security approaches. The conference examines how dependability and security principles apply to these resource-constrained contexts.
AI-driven security solutions represent a growing area of interest, encompassing both the use of machine learning for threat detection and anomaly identification, and the challenge of securing AI systems themselves against adversarial manipulation.
The Convergence of Security and Dependability
Historically, security and dependability developed as separate disciplines with distinct methodologies. Dependability research focused on fault tolerance, availability and reliability engineering, while security concentrated on confidentiality, integrity and access control. Modern computing environments have rendered this separation increasingly artificial.
A denial-of-service attack is simultaneously a security incident and an availability failure. Ransomware compromises both data integrity and system reliability. Supply chain attacks exploit trust relationships that dependability models traditionally assumed were secure. The IEEE DSC conference addresses this convergence directly, examining how unified approaches can address threats that span both domains.
Who Should Attend
The conference serves multiple professional communities. Academic researchers and graduate students benefit from exposure to current research directions and peer feedback on their work. Security engineers and system architects gain insight into emerging threats and defensive techniques that may inform their design decisions. IT managers and cybersecurity analysts can evaluate how research developments might address operational challenges in their organisations.
Technology leaders from research institutions and commercial organisations will find opportunities to identify collaboration possibilities and understand where the field is heading. The workshop format provides deeper engagement with specific technical areas, while poster sessions enable direct discussion with researchers about work in progress.
Conclusion
The 2026 IEEE Conference on Dependable and Secure Computing offers a structured environment for examining how computing systems can be designed, analysed and deployed to withstand both accidental failures and deliberate attacks. For professionals working at the intersection of reliability engineering and cybersecurity, the conference provides access to current research and practitioner perspectives on challenges that continue to grow in complexity and consequence.