WORM 2004

The 2nd Workshop on Rapid Malcode (WORM)

October 29th, 2004  
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

Held in association with the 11th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS-11)
Sponsored by: ACM SIGSAC
with contributions from

In the last several years, Internet-wide infectious epidemics have emerged as one of the leading threats to information security and service availability. The vehicles for these outbreaks, malicious codes called "worms", leverage the combination of software monocultures and the uncontrolled Internet communication model to quickly compromise large numbers of hosts. Current operational practices have not been able to manage these threats effectively and the research community is only now beginning to address this area.

This workshop continues the effort begun in 2003 to provide a forum to bring together ideas, understanding and experiences bearing on the worm problem from a wide range of communities, including academia, industry and the government. We are soliciting papers from researchers and practitioners on subjects including, but not limited to:

• Automatic detection and characterization
• Reactive countermeasures
• Proactive defenses
• Threat assessment
• Email malcode
• Measurement studies
• Testbeds & evaluation
• Reverse engineering
• Significant operational experiences
• Surveys of the field
• Analysis of worm construction, current & future
• Modeling and analysis of propagation dynamics
• Forensic methods of attribution

WORM aims to be a true workshop, with a primary goal of fostering the development of preliminary work and helping nucleate a worm-research community. To this end, WORM is open to two distinct classes of submissions.

First and foremost, we invite traditional submissions describing original work to appear in the WORM Proceedings to be published by ACM. Such submissions must not have been previously published and must not be in simultaneous submission elsewhere.

However, WORM is ALSO open to presentations of high-quality work previously published or in submission to ACM CCS. These will not appear in the proceedings, but the authors of accepted submissions of this form will be invited to present their work in the regular session at the workshop.

Papers describing original work should be at most 12 pages (double column) in an 11-point font with reasonable margins. Significantly shorter papers will also be considered in terms of the degree to which they might contribute to the Workshop goals of fostering a worm-research community. All such accepted papers will appear in the ACM WORM Proceedings.

Applications to give invited talks on work recently published, or in submission to ACM CCS, should include a copy of the paper clearly marked as to where it was (will be) published or the fact that it is a concurrent ACM CCS submission.

Submission Instructions:

Submission instructions will be posted in a timely matter at the workshop Web page: www.icir.org/vern/worm04/

Papers must be received by the deadline of June 30th, 2004. Reviews of submissions and notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent to the authors no later than August 14, 2004, and, for papers to appear in the WORM Proceedings, authors will have an opportunity to revise their work by September 1, 2004. PLEASE NOTE: Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their paper will be presented at the workshop.

Important Dates:

Program Committee: