The SUNRISE Workshop is a platform for interdisciplinary discussion at the intersection of hypertext theory and security.

Hypertext research was not born in a vacuum: Vannevar Bush's 1945 vision of the Memex [3]emerged directly from his role coordinating the US wartime scientific effort — including the Manhattan Project — and his conviction that networked, associative information systems were essential to managing the complexity of modern conflict. The ARPANET that followed was likewise a defense initiative before it was a public infrastructure. Security, in other words, was not a later concern grafted onto hypertext — it was present at its origin.

Today, we need to return to that awareness. In an era defined by information warfare, hybrid operations, and a fundamental shift in the nature of battlefields — from conventional weapons systems to drone warfare and remotely coordinated strikes — the structural properties of hypertext (linking, navigation, provenance, composition[5]) have become both instruments of attack and potential frameworks for defense.

The Hypertext 2026 theme of "hypertext as a method" creates the right conditions for bringing security questions into a framework where media philosophy, semiotics, and social analysis meet the technical realities of threat detection, information security and networked content protection.

Hypertext as a method[1] can frame an inquiry into security from navigational, spatial, and compositional perspectives. Phishing and link manipulation are pathologies of navigational structure [10]. Algorithmic amplification of disinformation exploits spatial hypertext's associative logic[2]. The crisis of content provenance is a crisis of compositional authority[9]. AI overproduction of texts sharpens all three[6]. SUNRISE workshop presents a methodological claim: that security belongs inside hypertext theory, where design design philosophy goes in hand with practical implementations of augmentation tools that hypertext offers[7].

The SUNRISE workshop brings together researchers from hypertext, cybersecurity, information science, artificial intelligence, communication studies, and digital humanities to examine security as both a technical and socio-cultural property of networked information systems. Rather than treating security as a problem confined to infrastructure, the workshop explores how the principles of hypertext – linking, navigation, association, provenance, and network structure – provide productive conceptual and analytical frameworks for understanding contemporary cybersecurity challenges[4]. The accepted papers and discussions span theoretical reflection, empirical analysis, computational methods, educational practice, and the design of secure digital environments.

We want to focus on security-by-design in hypertext authoring and publishing platforms to investigate threat models for collaborative writing environments, secure access control mechanisms, identity management, and the protection of web-based authoring tools against emerging attack vectors. Particular attention is given to balancing usability, openness, and collaborative knowledge production with robust security architectures.

The workshop also examines the rapidly changing landscape of information security in the context of misinformation[11], computational propaganda, and influence operations[8]. Contributors explore how contemporary security paradigms must evolve beyond the protection of infrastructure to include the protection of public knowledge, information ecosystems, and democratic communication. Discussions address new conceptual models of influence campaigns, hybrid information warfare, and the growing role of AI-generated content in large-scale manipulation.

Another major theme concerns navigational integrity. Hypertext navigation has traditionally been regarded as a neutral mechanism for accessing information, yet many contemporary cyberattacks exploit users’ navigational expectations. Papers examine cross-site scripting, malicious link manipulation, phishing attacks, deceptive interface design, and other forms of navigational fraud. Alongside technical countermeasures, the workshop highlights cybersecurity literacy as an essential navigational competence, emphasizing the skills required to critically evaluate links, sources, and online pathways [12].

The workshop also invites contributions that adopt historical and philosophical perspectives, considering security as a property of networks and hypertext as a method for understanding knowledge organization. These papers revisit historical models of distributed knowledge communities, from classical epistemic circles to contemporary decentralized social networks, exploring how trust, authority, and resilience emerge within interconnected structures. Such perspectives provide conceptual foundations for designing secure and trustworthy digital ecosystems.

Finally, the workshop addresses broader questions concerning platform governance and digital literacies. Contributors critically examine the responsibilities of online platforms, the legal and ethical liabilities of content providers, and the competencies required of users navigating increasingly complex information environments. Rather than viewing security solely as a technical problem, these discussions position it as a shared responsibility involving technological design, regulatory frameworks, institutional practices, and informed public participation.

Collectively, these themes position the workshop at the intersection of hypertext research and cybersecurity, demonstrating how concepts originating in hypertext theory provide valuable perspectives for understanding contemporary networked threats. By integrating technical, computational, legal, educational, and philosophical approaches, the workshop aims to establish an interdisciplinary research agenda in which hypertext serves not only as an object of study but also as a methodological framework for analysing and addressing the security challenges of digital societies.

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Imported from ACM’s structured HTML source. ACM Reference Format: Andrzej Adamski and Mariusz Pisarski. 2026. Hypertext and Security (SUNRISE'26): Goals, Scope, and Rationale of the First Workshop on Hypertext and Security. In 37th ACM Conference on Hypertext (HT '26), September 14--18, 2026, London, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA 2 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800935.3838298

[1] Claus Atzenbeck and Peter J. Nürnberg. 2019. Hypertext as Method. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (Hof, Germany) (HT ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 29–38. https://doi.org/10.1145/3342220.3343669

[2] Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. 2018. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford University Press.

[3] Vannevar Bush. 1945. As We May Think. The Atlantic Monthly 176, 1 (1945), 101–108.

[4] Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. 2025. C2PA Technical Specification. https://spec.c2pa.org/. Version 2.x.

[5] Jeff Conklin. 1987. Hypertext: An Introduction and Survey. IEEE Computer 20, 9 (1987), 17–41. https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.1987.1663693

[6] Emilio Ferrara. 2017. Disinformation and Social Bot Operations in the Run Up to the 2017 French Presidential Election. First Monday 22, 8 (2017). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i8.8005

[7] George P. Landow. 2006. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Johns Hopkins University Press.

[8] David M. J. Lazer, Matthew A. Baum, Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Pennycook, David Rothschild, Michael Schudson, Steven A. Sloman, Cass R. Sunstein, Emily A. Thorson, Duncan J. Watts, and Jonathan L. Zittrain. 2018. The Science of Fake News. Science 359, 6380 (2018), 1094–1096. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao2998

[9] National Cyber Security Centre. 2025. Public Content Provenance for Organisations. https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/.

[10] Bruce Schneier. 2000. Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World. John Wiley & Sons.

[11] Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral. 2018. The Spread of True and False News Online. Science 359, 6380 (2018), 1146–1151. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559

[12] Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan. 2017. Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy Making. Technical Report. Council of Europe.