
USENIX WOOT 2015 Call for Papers - tptacek
https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot15/call-for-papers
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tptacek
HN people with any interest in software security: submit to WOOT! I'm co-
chairing it this year.

USENIX WOOT is the academic equivalent of Black Hat or CanSec. It's a software
security conference with a special focus on "offensive" security:
vulnerability research, exploit development, and technology failures that lead
to those things.

If you were going to summarize the point of WOOT in one sentence: it's an
effort to cross-pollinate academic research with industry research that works
by getting the kind of work that would normally be submitted to Black Hat,
CanSec, Defcon, RECON, and ShmooCon and also getting it into the academic cite
record.

I'm trying to get WOOT to do a better job of engaging the open source and
startup communities.

WOOT does a pretty good job of getting contributions from the "software
security industry" (consultancies, security product companies, security
research labs). But more and more interesting and relevant work is being done
in the context of small projects. If you've built, say, a website that
processes financial transactions, and had to build up countermeasures for
fraud that's work that's relevant to WOOT, and WOOT is interested in
publishing it. If you've build a NoSQL database and had to come up with a
threat model to deal with new kinds of injection attacks, or to deal with
malicious cluster nodes: totally WOOT-worthy. As long as the work focuses on
the "attacker" side of the security problem, it's relevant to us.

You don't need to write a paper to submit! We're interested in outlines and
sketches of work, and will help you turn that work into a paper. You don't
have to write speculatively for us.

WOOT is relatively high profile. An accepted WOOT paper is a meaningful
contribution to the academic literature. We'd like to see more of it come from
the kinds of people who contribute to HN.

The proceedings from the previous 8 years of WOOT are available online. Check
out last year's, which includes (for instance) some pretty great work from Dan
Boneh, Grant Ho, Niels Provos and Lucas Ballard:

[https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot14/workshop-
program](https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot14/workshop-program)

Happy to answer questions!

~~~
djcapelis
I am incredibly thrilled to see you move the workshop in this direction. Also
incredibly happy to see you team up with the PoC||GTFO crew to help shake
things up. Academic publishing is in really bad need of it.

I am less excited however, that with these goals you decided to have the
workshop so close to CCC Camp. I assume that was USENIX scheduling, but kinda
rough for people going to CCC Camp to go to WOOT too.

Edit: I originally thought this was during CCC Camp and freaked out. My
calendar was wrong, sorry about that.

~~~
tptacek
Getting Travis Goodspeed involved was Aurelien's idea, not mine. :)

I'm glad what we're trying to do this year makes sense. Shoot me ideas for
program committee members! We really want to get some new faces this year.

------
tptacek
Also: we're still putting the Program Committee together. I'd love (in email,
please) suggestions for PC candidates that _aren 't_ from the software
security industry or academia.

Being on the PC isn't a huge time commitment; it's just reading papers and
calling out the particularly interesting ones.

~~~
sam_bwut
What about undergraduates?

