Abstract

Over the past decade, the cybersecurity research community has invested heavily in artifact evaluation to improve reproducibility. Conferences increasingly collect, evaluate, and award badges to research artifacts, such as code and datasets. While these efforts have increased artifact availability and quality, they have not yet increased reuse nor led to vertical scientific progress, where research teams independently work on common problems and build upon each other's work. Artifact evaluation, as currently practiced, validates individual research claims, but does not create sustained, shared technical foundations for vertical scientific progress. In this position paper, we argue for a shift from artifact validation to artifact ecosystems and a practical path forward through what we call living artifacts. A living artifact readily deploys on public research infrastructure, and remains open to execution and versioned extension by …

Date

2026

Authors

Jelena Mirkovic, David Balenson

Conference

2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW)

Pages

293-299

Publisher

IEEE