The annual uASC conference serves as a premier forum for advancing our understanding of the security of microarchitectures. Each year, uASC brings together international experts from academia and industry, to present and discuss novel research in this area. The conference proceedings of uASC are published by Ruhr University Bochum in an issue of the Proceedings of the Microarchitecture Security Conference. With a Gold Open Access status, all papers published in the proceedings are immediately and freely available at the start of the conference.
uASC is looking for top-quality papers
Despite its young age, uASC aims to be a first-choice conference for microarchitecture security research (i.e., following the terminology for A-level topic conferences). uASC solicits submissions of high-quality, original scientific papers presenting novel research on microarchitecture security (attacks and defenses).
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Attacks and defenses on various commodity hardware components
- Exploration of (unconventional) threat models in microarchitecture security
- Hardware security analysis techniques
- Microarchitecture security on outdated patch levels, unlikely configurations, and misconfigurations
- Operating system and hypervisor side channels
- Reverse-engineering of microarchitectures for security
- Secure hardware development practices
- Security of hardware-software interfaces
- Systematic insights on the reproducibility of microarchitectural attacks
- Systematic insights on the reproducibility of security and performance claims of microarchitectural defenses
- Systematization of knowledge in microarchitecture security
- Trusted execution environments
uASC has two submission categories: Full Paper submissions, which undergo thorough academic review, and Talk/Poster submissions, which are accompanied by an optional two-page abstract. uASC welcomes high-quality contributions from both academia and industry, including work-in-progress reports.
All papers are judged on scientific rigor, insights, novelty, correctness, and clarity as well as the clear documentation of limitations. We expect all papers to provide enough details to enable reproducibility of the experimental results, and submissions are encouraged to open-source research artifacts. uASC has a double-blind reviewing process for papers. All accepted papers are part of the proceedings.
Venue: KU Leuven, Belgium
uASC'26 will take place as a full-day, in-person event at the KU Leuven Department of Computer Science on February 3, 2026. See the venue page for more information on exact location and arrival information.