15th IEEE Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT)

The Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT) aims to present a broad picture of offense and its contributions, bringing together researchers and practitioners across all areas of computer security. Offensive Security has changed from a hobby to an industry.

No longer an exercise for isolated enthusiasts, offensive security is today a large-scale operation managed by organized, capitalized actors. Meanwhile, the landscape has shifted: software used by millions is built by startups less than a year old, delivered on mobile phones, and surveilled by national signals intelligence agencies.

In the field’s infancy, offensive security research was conducted separately by industry, independent hackers, or in academia. Collaboration between these groups was difficult. Since 2007, the Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT) has been bringing those communities together.

Computer security exposes the differences between the actual mechanisms of everyday trusted technologies and their models used by developers, architects, academic researchers, owners, operators, and end-users. While being inherently focused on practice, security also poses questions such as “what kind of computations are and aren’t trusted systems capable of?” which harken back to fundamentals of computability. State-of-the-art offense explores these questions pragmatically, gathering material for generalizations that lead to better models and more trustworthy systems.

WOOT provides a forum for high-quality, peer-reviewed work discussing tools and techniques for attacks. Submissions should reflect the state of the art in offensive computer security technology, exposing poorly understood mechanisms, presenting novel attacks, highlighting the limitations of published attacks and defenses, or surveying the state of offensive operations at scale.

WOOT ’21 accepts papers in both an academic security context and more applied work that informs the field about the state of security practice in offensive techniques.