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 will be hosted at the University of Kent in Canterbury. This workshop is being organised by the CyCOS project, a UKRI/RISCS-funded research project, and 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:
- Previously Published Research (Presentation only) – Authors may submit a proposal to present research that has already been published.
- Short Paper (up to 4 pages / 2,000 words) – Authors may submit a short paper presenting new, unpublished research.
- Full Paper (up to 10 pages / 7,500 words) – Authors may submit a full paper presenting new, unpublished research.
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.
If you have any questions, please contact us: contact@cycos.org.
