# [FOSDEM 2026 - Open Source Digital Forensics Devroom CFP](https://fosdem-osdf-devroom.github.io/cfp_2026/) The Call for Papers for the Open Source Digital Forensics devroom is now open! FOSDEM 2026 will take place at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, on **Saturday, January 31st and Sunday, February 1st, 2026**. If you're building, breaking, or bending open source forensic tools—or just doing weird and wonderful things in the world of digital forensics—we want to hear from you. Whether you’re hacking on memory parsers, wrangling cloud artifacts, reverse‑engineering obscure formats, or just have a good war story from the trenches, this is the place to share it. Funny titles encouraged, demos welcome, and yes—if you’ve ever dropped chain of custody or Locard’s exchange principle into casual conversation, you’ll feel right at home ## What We’re Looking For If your work touches digital evidence, we’re interested. Some clusters to get you thinking: - 🧠 Memory, disk, and filesystems: Volatility plugins, encrypted memory, APFS/ZFS/Btrfs, carving, timelines, damaged media - 📱 Mobile, IoT, and hardware: Bootloader exploits, chip-off/JTAG, oddball devices, custom rigs - ☁️ Cloud, containers, and networks: Ephemeral evidence, hypervisor introspection, encrypted traffic, protocol archaeology - 🔍 Reverse engineering & recovery: Proprietary formats, obfuscated data, deleted files, password cracking - 🕵️ Anti-forensics & detection: Wiping patterns, data hiding, sabotage spotting - 🔗 Scaling & interoperability: Common formats, pipelines, GPU/distributed processing, multi-terabyte datasets - 🤖 ML & privacy-aware forensics: AI for triage/classification, differential privacy, ethical boundaries - 📚 Case studies & war stories: Real-world investigations, lessons learned, examiner-proof workflows - 🧪 Anything else: If it’s open source and forensic-y, we want to hear about it If you think about things like chain of custody, Locard’s exchange principle, or how to make your tool stand up in court—we definitely want your talk. ## Who Should Submit Anyone doing technical work in open source forensics. Whether you maintain a major framework or just wrote your first parser last week, we want to hear from you. First-time speakers, students, hobbyists, and seasoned experts are all welcome. Talks should be accessible to a technical audience, but don’t be afraid to go deep—our crowd loves technical rigor. And demos are very welcome. ## Talk Format Talks are 25 minutes by default. We like them short and sharp. But if you really need more time for a deep dive, say so in your submission—we’ll see what we can do. ## How to Submit We’re using [pretalx](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2026/cfp) this year—no more Pentabarf nightmares. Your submission should include: - Your name - Short bio - Contact info - Talk title (funny titles encouraged!) - Abstract (what you’re gonna talk about) - Duration (25 minutes, unless you make a case for more) ## Important Dates - 🗓️ December 7th: Submission deadline - ⚠️ FAQ: Is the deadline final? Technically, you can submit as long as pretalx allows it—but talks submitted before the 7th get priority - 📣 ASAP: Announcement of selected talks - 🎉 January 31–February 1: FOSDEM 2026! ## Volunteering FOSDEM runs on volunteers. If you want to help make the event awesome, visit [volunteers.fosdem.org](https://volunteers.fosdem.org/) to sign up. ## Contact You can reach us at open-source-digital-forensics-devroom-manager@fosdem.org