WORM 2006

The 4^th Workshop on Recurring Malcode (WORM)

November 3^rd, 2006  
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

Held in association with the 13^th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS-13)
Sponsored by: ACM SIGSAC
with contributions from

Internet-wide infectious epidemics have emerged as one of the leading threats to information security and service availability. Self-propagating threats, generally termed 'worms', exploit software weaknesses, hardware limitations, Internet topology, and the open Internet communication model to compromise large numbers of networked systems. Internet worms are increasingly being used as delivery mechanisms for malicious payloads such as spyware, phishing servers, spam relays, and information espionage. Unfortunately, current operational practices still face significant challenges in containing these threats as evidenced by the rise in automated botnet networks and the continued presence of worms released years ago.

This workshop provides a forum for exchanging ideas, increasing understanding, and relating experiences on self-propagating malicious software 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 worm detection and characterization
• Reactive countermeasures
• Proactive defenses
• Detecting and disrupting botnets and malware command and control
• Threat assessment
• New threats and related challenges
• Measurement studies
• Testbeds & evaluation
• Reverse engineering
• Significant operational experiences
• Analysis of worm/botnet 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 classes of submissions.

Paper Submissions:
First and foremost, we invite traditional paper 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.

Papers describing original work should be at most 8 pages long (double column) in an 11-point font with at least 1-inch 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.

Papers submitted must be original unpublished work and must not be simultaneously submitted or under review for any other workshop, conference or journal. Any paper found to be in violation of these rules will be rejected without review. Papers accompanied by non-disclosure agreement forms will not be considered. All submissions are treated as confidential, both as a matter of policy and in accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.

Panel Submissions:
WORM is also soliciting proposals for a discussion panel on a topic relevant to the workshop. Panel proposals must include the title of the panel, an abstract describing the topic and why it should be of interest to the WORM community, and a list of potential panelists. Panels are expected to be at most 1 hour long, comprised of short presentations by the panelists followed by discussion among panel members and the audience; other formats may be used, but should be described in the proposal.

Submission Instructions:

Deadline extended to Monday June 19^th, 2006.

Papers must be received by 23:59:59 (EDT) of June 19^th, 2006. Reviews of submissions and notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent to the authors no later than August 9^th, 2006, and, for papers to appear in the WORM Proceedings, authors will have an opportunity to revise their work by August 21^st, 2006. PLEASE NOTE: Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their paper will be presented at the workshop.

Please submit papers via the web using the WORM 2006 submission website.

Important Dates:

Program Committee:

• Program Committee Chair: Farnam Jahanian (University of Michigan)
• Publicity Chair: Fabian Monrose (Johns Hopkins University)
• Michael Bailey (University of Michigan)
• Dan Boneh (Stanford University)
• Linda Briesemeister (SRI)
• Miguel Castro (Microsoft Research)
• Angelos Keromytis (Columbia University)
• Yoshi Kohno (University of California, San Diego)
• Wenke Lee (Georgia Tech)
• Doug Maughan (DHS)
• Fabian Monrose (Johns Hopkins University)
• Niels Provos (Google)
• Dawn Song (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Dug Song (Arbor Networks)
• Cliff Zou (University of Central Florida)