Where will ISEC 2026 be held?

The 20th International Security Conference (ISEC 2026) will take place in the city of Seoul, KOR.

What is the primary focus of ISEC 2026?

ISEC 2026 will primarily focus on AI-driven autonomous security, exploring its implications and applications in global security contexts.

What type of event is ISEC 2026?

ISEC 2026 is an international conference, serving as a forum for experts and leaders in the security domain.

ISEC 2026 (The 20th International Security Conference)

Name: ISEC 2026 (The 20th International Security Conference)
Start: 2026-08-11 00:00:00+00:00
End: 2026-08-12 00:00:00+00:00
Location: Seoul

Aug 11–12, 2026Seoul, South KoreaIn-person

Starts in 3 daysRegistration open

The International Security Conference (ISEC) is an annual event that brings together experts, policymakers, and industry leaders to discuss critical issues in global security. The upcoming 20th iteration, ISEC 2026, will be held in Seoul, KOR, focusing on the transformative impact of AI-driven autonomous security. This conference serves as a vital platform for sharing insights, fostering collaboration, and exploring innovative solutions to complex security challenges in an increasingly interconnected world.

Committees & topics

Topics
IT Security and Information Protection Solutions · Convergence Security Solutions · AI-Driven Autonomous Security Operations · Securing Artificial Intelligence Systems · Cloud-Native SIEM Platforms · Securing Software-as-a-Service Ecosystems · Security of AI User Interfaces · Security Implications of the Model Context Protocol

Why it matters

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and its application in autonomous security systems presents both unprecedented opportunities and significant challenges. As nations and organizations increasingly integrate AI into their defense and security infrastructures, understanding the implications for international relations, ethical considerations, and strategic stability becomes paramount. ISEC 2026's focus on AI-driven autonomous security is particularly relevant given the ongoing global discourse on the regulation and responsible development of such technologies.

This conference is crucial for shaping future policy and technological development in the security sector. Discussions will likely cover topics ranging from cyber defense and critical infrastructure protection to the ethical deployment of autonomous weapons systems. The insights generated here can inform national security strategies, influence international cooperation frameworks, and guide the private sector in developing secure and reliable AI solutions. The gathering in Seoul, KOR, a hub of technological innovation, further underscores the importance of this event in addressing cutting-edge security concerns.

How to prepare

To effectively engage with the discussions at ISEC 2026, delegates should undertake thorough preparation, particularly concerning the multifaceted nature of AI-driven autonomous security. A foundational understanding of the technical aspects of AI, machine learning, and automation in security contexts is essential. This includes familiarity with current capabilities, limitations, and emerging trends in areas such as predictive analytics, automated threat detection, and autonomous response systems.

Beyond the technical, delegates should prepare by examining the geopolitical implications of AI in security. This involves researching the national security doctrines and technological advancements of key global players, as well as understanding the various international initiatives and debates surrounding AI governance and arms control. Considering different national perspectives on AI ethics and data sovereignty will be crucial for constructive dialogue. Lessons such as "Engagement Strategies" and "Dynamic Analysis" can provide frameworks for approaching complex international security topics. Additionally, exploring "What Is Stakeholder Mapping?" and "Hidden Stakeholders" can help identify the diverse actors and interests involved in the development and deployment of AI-driven security solutions.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

South Korea

A leading nation in AI research and development, with a strong interest in leveraging autonomous security for national defense and critical infrastructure protection, while also navigating regional security complexities.

Role in topic

As the host nation, KOR is at the forefront of AI innovation and its application in security. Its perspective will likely emphasize the potential for AI to enhance national defense capabilities and cybersecurity, while also addressing concerns about data privacy and ethical AI deployment. KOR's experience with advanced technology and regional security challenges will provide a unique context for discussions.

United States

A major developer and deployer of AI technologies for military and intelligence applications, advocating for responsible innovation and international norms while maintaining a strategic advantage.

Role in topic

The USA is a dominant force in AI research and military application. Its perspective will focus on maintaining a technological edge, developing ethical guidelines for AI in warfare, and promoting international cooperation to counter emerging threats. The USA will likely highlight the importance of interoperability and robust cybersecurity in autonomous systems.

China

A rapidly advancing power in AI, with significant state-backed investment in autonomous security for both domestic control and military modernization, often emphasizing national sovereignty in AI development.

Role in topic

CHN's rapid advancements in AI, particularly in surveillance and military applications, make its perspective critical. CHN will likely emphasize its sovereign right to develop AI technologies for national security, potentially advocating for different international norms regarding AI governance. Its approach to data collection and integration of AI into societal control systems will be a key point of discussion.

Germany

A proponent of ethical AI development and international regulation, particularly concerning autonomous weapons systems, while also investing in AI for civilian security applications.

Role in topic

DEU is a strong advocate for ethical considerations and international regulation of AI, especially in the context of autonomous weapons. Its perspective will likely focus on preventing an AI arms race, ensuring human control over critical decisions, and promoting transparency in AI development for security purposes. DEU's emphasis on multilateralism will be evident in its contributions.

United Kingdom

A significant player in defense AI, balancing innovation with ethical frameworks and international collaboration, particularly within NATO and Five Eyes alliances.

Role in topic

The GBR has a robust defense AI strategy, focusing on both offensive and defensive capabilities. Its perspective will likely highlight the need for agile innovation balanced with strong ethical guidelines and adherence to international law. The GBR will also emphasize collaboration with allies on AI research and development, particularly in areas like cyber defense.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

IT Security and Information Protection Solutions

Information security as a discipline emerged in the 1970s with mainframe access controls and matured through the 1990s as enterprise networks, the internet, and e-commerce created new attack surfaces. Frameworks such as ISO/IEC 27001 (first published as BS 7799 in 1995) and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (2014) codified the now-standard CIA triad of confidentiality, integrity, and availability, while regulations including the EU GDPR (2018), the U.S. HIPAA and SOX regimes, and South Korea's PIPA established legal duties for data protection. The contemporary landscape is shaped by ransomware-as-a-service ecosystems, supply-chain compromises such as SolarWinds (2020) and MOVEit (2023), and the steady expansion of state-aligned intrusion campaigns documented by CISA, ENISA, and KISA. Enterprises have responded by shifting from perimeter-based defense toward zero-trust architectures, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and data-centric protection including encryption, tokenization, and data loss prevention. The core policy dispute today is how to balance regulatory harmonization, cross-border data flows, and disclosure mandates (such as the U.S. SEC's 2023 cyber-incident rule and the EU NIS2 Directive) against operational realities for global firms. Standards bodies, national CERTs, and major vendors continue to negotiate the baseline for what constitutes adequate information protection.

Key players

Convergence Security Solutions

Convergence security refers to the integration of physical security (access control, CCTV, intrusion detection) with logical/IT security into unified architectures. The concept gained traction in the mid-2000s as IP-based cameras, networked badge readers, and building management systems migrated onto enterprise networks, blurring the line between cyber and physical risk. ASIS International and ISACA formalized the field through the Alliance for Enterprise Security Risk Management in 2005. Driving the convergence push are operational technology (OT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) deployments in manufacturing, utilities, and smart cities. Incidents such as the 2015 and 2016 attacks on Ukraine's power grid, the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware event, and repeated water-utility intrusions in the United States demonstrated that compromises in IT systems can cascade into physical harm. South Korea has been a notable early adopter, integrating convergence security into its smart-city pilots and critical-infrastructure protection regime under the Act on the Protection of Information and Communications Infrastructure. Current debates center on governance — whether CISOs or CSOs should own converged risk — and on standards interoperability across IEC 62443 (industrial systems), ISO 27001 (information security), and physical-security norms. Procurement rules excluding certain foreign-made surveillance equipment, notably U.S. and allied restrictions on specific Chinese vendors, have added a geopolitical dimension.

Key players

AI-Driven Autonomous Security Operations

The application of machine learning to security operations began in earnest in the early 2010s with user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and next-generation antivirus products. The volume of telemetry generated by modern enterprises — routinely measured in terabytes per day — made human-only triage untenable, and SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response) platforms emerged around 2015 to codify playbook-driven response. Recent generative-AI advances have accelerated interest in agentic systems capable of autonomous detection, investigation, and remediation. Major vendors including Microsoft, Google, CrowdStrike, and Palo Alto Networks have launched AI copilots and autonomous SOC offerings since 2023, while defenders increasingly face AI-enabled adversaries using LLMs for phishing, vulnerability discovery, and malware generation. National efforts such as DARPA's AI Cyber Challenge (2023–2025) have explicitly targeted autonomous vulnerability discovery and patching as a strategic capability. The core unresolved questions are accountability and assurance. Autonomous action on production systems raises concerns about false positives causing outages, model drift, adversarial manipulation of detection models, and unclear liability when an AI agent takes a containment action that harms business operations. The U.S. AI Executive Order (2023), the EU AI Act (2024), and emerging guidance from NIST's AI Safety Institute are beginning to shape the compliance perimeter.

Key players

Securing Artificial Intelligence Systems

AI security — as distinct from using AI for security — concerns the protection of AI models, training data, and deployment pipelines against adversarial threats. The field gained academic traction following early work on adversarial examples (Szegedy et al., 2013) and model-extraction attacks, and has expanded to include prompt injection, training-data poisoning, model theft, and supply-chain risks affecting open-weight models distributed via repositories such as Hugging Face. Generative AI's enterprise rollout since 2022 has surfaced concrete incidents: data leakage from employees pasting sensitive information into public chatbots, prompt-injection attacks against retrieval-augmented systems, and jailbreaks bypassing safety guardrails. OWASP's Top 10 for LLM Applications (first released in 2023) and MITRE ATLAS catalog the emerging threat taxonomy, while NIST's AI Risk Management Framework (2023) and the EU AI Act (2024) provide governance scaffolding. Policy debate is active on several fronts: mandatory red-teaming and pre-deployment evaluation of frontier models (advanced by the U.S., U.K., and EU AI Safety Institutes since the 2023 Bletchley Park summit), liability for harms caused by model outputs, and export controls on advanced AI compute. There is no consensus yet on technical standards for model provenance, watermarking, or evaluation, though ISO/IEC 42001 (2023) provides an initial management-system anchor.

Key players

Cloud-Native SIEM Platforms

Security information and event management (SIEM) emerged in the mid-2000s through the merger of log management and security event correlation, dominated initially by on-premises appliances from vendors such as ArcSight, QRadar, and Splunk. The migration of enterprise workloads to public cloud — accelerated after 2015 — exposed the cost and scalability limits of legacy SIEM, as ingest volumes grew faster than license budgets and as relevant telemetry increasingly originated in SaaS and cloud-provider logs rather than on-premises sources. Cloud-native SIEMs, including Microsoft Sentinel (2019), Google Chronicle (2018, now Security Operations), and cloud-delivered editions of Splunk and Elastic, decoupled storage from compute and introduced consumption-based pricing, often paired with built-in SOAR and UEBA. Hyperscalers' own detection services (AWS GuardDuty, Azure Defender, Google SCC) have created overlapping markets, while regulators in the EU, Korea, and elsewhere have pressed for data-residency controls and sovereign-cloud options. The principal current issues are vendor lock-in, the high cost of long-retention compliance logging (driven by regulations such as PCI-DSS and NIS2), and the integration of AI copilots that can query natural-language across pooled telemetry. Cross-border data transfer rules, including the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and Korea's PIPA, constrain how cloud SIEM telemetry can be aggregated globally.

Key players

Securing Software-as-a-Service Ecosystems

Software-as-a-service became the default enterprise delivery model after 2010, with platforms such as Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, ServiceNow, and Workday now holding the bulk of organizational data. The security model shifted to shared responsibility: providers secure the platform, while customers retain responsibility for identity, configuration, data, and third-party integrations. SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) emerged as a category around 2020 to address chronic misconfiguration, over-permissioned OAuth grants, and shadow-SaaS sprawl. High-profile incidents have underscored the systemic risk: the 2023 Microsoft Storm-0558 token-forging intrusion affecting U.S. government tenants, the Okta support-system breach also in 2023, and the 2024 Snowflake customer-credential compromises affecting Ticketmaster, AT&T, and others. The U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board's report on Storm-0558 was sharply critical of cloud-identity security practices, while CISA's Secure by Design initiative has pressed SaaS vendors to adopt defaults such as mandatory MFA and free logging. Debate now centers on whether identity-provider concentration constitutes systemic risk, how to standardize SaaS audit logs (the OpenID Shared Signals & Events framework is one effort), and the boundaries of provider versus customer responsibility for nation-state-level threats. Regulatory pressure from the EU's DORA (effective 2025) on financial-sector third-party risk is shaping global practice.

Key players

Security of AI User Interfaces

The conversational interface introduced by ChatGPT in late 2022 has rapidly become a primary surface through which users interact with enterprise systems, often via embedded copilots in productivity suites, IDEs, and customer-service tools. This shift has created a new category of interface-level security concerns distinct from underlying model risk: indirect prompt injection through retrieved content, plugin and tool-use abuse, context-window data leakage, and UI-level deception via hallucinated citations or spoofed agent outputs. Documented attack patterns since 2023 include email-based indirect prompt injection against Microsoft 365 Copilot, image-borne instructions targeting multimodal interfaces, and exfiltration via crafted Markdown rendering. OWASP's LLM Top 10 and academic work from CMU, ETH Zurich, and the U.K. AI Safety Institute have begun cataloging these threats, while browser-based agentic AI (such as autonomous browsing agents released by major labs in 2024–2025) has expanded the attack surface to arbitrary web content. The policy and standards space remains immature. Key open questions involve user-consent models for agent actions, provenance signaling (C2PA and similar), session isolation between trusted and untrusted content, and accessibility-versus-security trade-offs. There is no equivalent yet to the web's same-origin policy for AI interfaces, and vendors are converging on ad hoc mitigations rather than common standards.

Key players

Security Implications of the Model Context Protocol

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open specification introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 to standardize how AI assistants connect to external data sources and tools. It defines a client-server architecture in which AI applications (clients) can discover and invoke capabilities exposed by MCP servers — file systems, databases, SaaS APIs, internal services — through a common JSON-RPC interface. Adoption accelerated through 2025 as OpenAI, Google, and major IDE vendors announced compatibility, positioning MCP as a de facto interoperability layer for agentic AI. The protocol's security model is still maturing. Early reviews by Trail of Bits, Invariant Labs, and others identified concerns including unauthenticated local servers, prompt-injection propagation through tool descriptions ("tool poisoning"), excessive scope in OAuth-style authorization flows, and the difficulty of conveying trust boundaries between a user, a host application, and downstream MCP servers. The 2025 protocol revisions introduced an OAuth 2.1-based authorization framework, but consistent implementation across the ecosystem remains uneven. The central debate mirrors earlier debates over browser plugin architectures and OAuth: how to enable a useful third-party ecosystem without creating a permissioning model that users cannot reasonably evaluate. Open questions include server identity and signing, sandboxing of local servers, audit logging standards compatible with cloud SIEM, and whether MCP needs a formal trust registry analogous to certificate authorities.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for ISEC 2026 (The 20th International Security Conference).

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Arming an archipelago: Is time running out for Europe's oldest DMZ? | Euronews

Comprehensive approach to security: Federal Council launches consultation on Switzerland's security policy strategy

Georgia Considers Position in New South Caucasus Transit Era - Jamestown

North Korea's Nuclear Navy Developments

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

South Korea August 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

ISEC 2026 (The 20th International Security Conference)

Aug 11–12, 2026Seoul, South KoreaIn-person

Starts in 3 daysRegistration open

Committees & topics

Topics
IT Security and Information Protection Solutions · Convergence Security Solutions · AI-Driven Autonomous Security Operations · Securing Artificial Intelligence Systems · Cloud-Native SIEM Platforms · Securing Software-as-a-Service Ecosystems · Security of AI User Interfaces · Security Implications of the Model Context Protocol

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

South Korea

Role in topic

United States

A major developer and deployer of AI technologies for military and intelligence applications, advocating for responsible innovation and international norms while maintaining a strategic advantage.

Role in topic

China

Role in topic

Germany

A proponent of ethical AI development and international regulation, particularly concerning autonomous weapons systems, while also investing in AI for civilian security applications.

Role in topic

United Kingdom

A significant player in defense AI, balancing innovation with ethical frameworks and international collaboration, particularly within NATO and Five Eyes alliances.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

IT Security and Information Protection Solutions

Key players

Convergence Security Solutions

Key players

AI-Driven Autonomous Security Operations

Key players

Securing Artificial Intelligence Systems

Key players

Cloud-Native SIEM Platforms

Key players

Securing Software-as-a-Service Ecosystems

Key players

Security of AI User Interfaces

Key players

Security Implications of the Model Context Protocol

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for ISEC 2026 (The 20th International Security Conference).

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Arming an archipelago: Is time running out for Europe's oldest DMZ? | Euronews

Comprehensive approach to security: Federal Council launches consultation on Switzerland's security policy strategy

Georgia Considers Position in New South Caucasus Transit Era - Jamestown

North Korea's Nuclear Navy Developments

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

South Korea August 2026

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Asan Plenum 2026

9th Economic Security Diplomacy Forum

2026 Kyunghyang Forum

Jeju Forum 2026: Between Collective Defense and Collective Security: Toward a New Security Architecture in East Asia

Korean Peninsula Symposium 2026

ICONIK 2026 International Conference by Indonesian Students in Korea

Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Asan Plenum 2026

9th Economic Security Diplomacy Forum

2026 Kyunghyang Forum

Jeju Forum 2026: Between Collective Defense and Collective Security: Toward a New Security Architecture in East Asia

Korean Peninsula Symposium 2026

ICONIK 2026 International Conference by Indonesian Students in Korea

Frequently asked questions