Lab Retreat & Workshop @ SOUPS 2026 🚆

Karola Marky chairing the session “Phishing & Social Engineering”

This year’s edition of the SOUPS conference took part in the beautiful German city Hannover. Usually, SOUPS is co-located with the Usenix Security Symposium which is located in changing locations in North America. Because of that, it was refreshing for the community to have SOUPS in Europe. Since Hannover is just about two hours by train from Bochum, my team leveraged the chance to attend SOUPS in person as a kind of “lab retreat”, but we also had different tasks during the conference.

Conference Orga

I (Karola Marky) was part of the organizer team as Poster co-chair together with my fellow researcher Yaxing Yao from Johns Hopkins University (US). Overall, 65 posters were accepted this year which resulted in a very lively poster session during which I actually managed to watch a short presentation of each poster. Our PhD student Lena was among the presenters and discussed our work on privacy avatars with the conference audience.

This year, SOUPS also changed the discussion format: Instead of a short Q&A after each talk, there was a longer Q&A in the end of each session with all presenters. This resulted in a more engaging discussion, but as a session chair I have to admit that more moderation skills are required. I personally liked the format because the Q&A after each talk felt more of a duty rather than a discussion in the past years (at least for some conferences).

Pre-Conference Workshop

Workshop organizers & participants

On Monday, before the conference started, we hosted the workshop Making S&P Graspable: Workshop on Tangible Privacy and Security Interfaces together with our research friends from LMU Munich.

The workshop program was a combination of presentations and interactive components during which we build paper prototypes.