Welcome to the BSides Joburg 2024 CFP (Call for Papers and Workshops)

TL;DR

Event Date: 20 July 2024
Venue: Focus Rooms, Johannesburg
Theme: A New Dawn
CFP Close: 23:59 31 May 2024
CFP Notifications: 10 June 2024
Code of conduct

Our Theme - A New Dawn

Just like the sun rises on a new day, we want to celebrate a new beginning as BSides Joburg 2024 will be the inaugural BSides event in Johannesburg. Our theme for this event is “A New Dawn” which aims to bring current cybersecurity challenges into focus, to shed light on problems and to illuminate the way forward.

We want to shed light on critical issues, fresh perspectives, lessons learned, policy issues, and new approaches to existing problems. As we celebrate a new start, we also welcome talks for those just getting into information security which could include introductory talks into DNS, Cloud, Network Security, Penetration Testing or any other topics that are relevant.

While we do prefer talks that align with our theme, we welcome all research and talks that cover other topics in the cybersecurity realm.

Talk Types

Standard Talks

Our standard talks are 45 minutes long. If you need less (e.g. 30 mins) or longer (1 hour) please let us know and we will try to accommodate you.

Lightning Talks

Our lightning talks are 15 minutes long

Workshops

Workshops are a great opportunity for attendees to get hands-on learning from experts in the field. We invite proposals for workshops for hands-on training around various topics in cybersecurity. Workshops around network security, API security, application security, penetration testing and tool demonstrations have been popular at other BSides events. These workshops can cater for novice or experts, however note that most people attending this event will be on the more experienced side of information security.

We are aiming to have a dedicated workshop day before the conference (Friday 19 July) depending on the CFPs that we receive and sponsor commitments. The Friday workshop sessions can be a half-day (4 hour) or full day (8 hour) which includes time for breaks. We will host workshops on Saturday, however these sessions will be limited to either 1 or 2 hour sessions. If you submit a proposal for Friday and we do not go ahead with the dedicated workshop day, you will be given an opportunity to present on Saturday if you would like to do that.

We welcome workshop proposals from vendors, however these proposals must add value to attendees and cannot be sales pitch orientated. These workshops should have a practical component and will be subject to additional scrutiny to ensure a high quality event. If you are a vendor submitting a workshop proposal, detailed information about what the workshop will cover must be included in your proposal. We recognize that many attendees would like to get hands on time with tools they may not use, and doing a walk-through of an incident, investigation, vulnerability or assessment using your tooling could be a good idea so long as the attendee can walk away with something tangible from the workshop.