Overview

This workshop emphasises dialogue, reflection, and collective sense making around researching security, privacy, and trust in SME contexts.

Workshop Scope and Focus

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) play a central role in the economy, yet they face distinctive and often under examined challenges around cybersecurity, privacy, and trust. Compared to large organisations, SMEs typically operate with limited resources, informal structures, and close personal relationships between owners, employees, customers, and suppliers. These characteristics shape how security and privacy practices are understood, adopted, and lived in everyday work.

The challenges faced by SMEs sit at the intersection of organisational practice, regulatory environments, economic constraints, and human and psychological factors such as risk perception, trust, responsibility, and decision making. Despite their importance, these issues remain relatively understudied in comparison to research focused on large enterprises.

The SME-CPT workshop brings together academics, researchers and early career researchers, who study SMEs and related topics in cybersecurity, privacy, and trust, from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including computing, management, psychology, sociology, and law. The aim is to create a small, interactive space for sharing ideas, discussing work in progress, and building relationships across fields. Rather than prioritising polished results, the workshop emphasises dialogue, reflection, and collective sense making around the realities of researching security, privacy, and trust in SME contexts.

SME-CPT is organised by the CyCOS project and hosted at the University of Kent in Canterbury. It is intended to support the development of a connected and interdisciplinary research community around SMEs, cybersecurity, privacy, and trust.

Workshop Call for Papers/Presentations

We invite papers/presentations that explore these themes in relation to SMEs. Submissions may include empirical studies, theoretical contributions, methodological reflections, or early stage and exploratory work. We particularly welcome contributions that foreground SME specific contexts, engage with psychological or organisational dimensions of security and privacy, or challenge existing assumptions in the field.

Authors may submit one of the following types of papers or presentations:

1. Previously Published Research (Presentation only) - Authors may submit a proposal to present research that has already been published, submitting the full paper for consideration.
2. Short Paper (up to 4 pages / 2,000 words) - Authors may submit a short paper presenting new, unpublished research.
3. Full Paper (up to 10 pages / 7,500 words) - Authors may submit a full paper presenting new, unpublished research.

All papers should be submitted via EasyChair.

The relevant deadlines for authors are as follows:

• 24th April – Paper Submission (all paper types)
• 29th May – Review notifications to authors
• 19th June – Final papers due (for full and short papers only)

Post-Workshop Publication Opportunities

Authors of accepted short and full papers will be eligible to submit an extended version of their work to a special issue of Information and Computer Security.

• Short papers must be substantially extended before submission to the special issue (i.e. to the length of a full paper)
• Full papers may be submitted directly to the special issue.

Please note that all submissions will be subject to the review policies and standards of the journal.

Workshop Organisation

Workshop Co-Chairs

Jason R.C. Nurse (University of Kent, UK)
Maria Bada (Queen Mary, University of London, UK)
Steven Furnell (University of Nottingham, UK)

Programme Committee 

Ingolf Becker (UCL, UK)
Edward Cartwright (De Montfort University, UK)
Yulia Cherdantseva (Cardiff University, UK)

Murray Jennex (West Texas A&M University, USA)

Vasilis Katos (Bournemouth University, UK)
Jacques Ophoff (Abertay University, UK)
Emmanouil Panaousis (University of Greenwich, UK)
Karen Renaud (Strathclyde University, UK)

Organising Committee

Ram Herkanaidu (University of Nottingham, UK)
Neeshé Khan (University of Nottingham, UK)
Matthew Rand (Queen Mary, University of London, UK)
 

If you have any questions, please contact contact@cycos.org