Workshop on Measurements, Attacks, and Defenses for the Web (MADWeb) 2025

Call for Papers

The web connects billions of devices, running a plethora of clients, and serves billions of users every day. To cope with such a widespread adoption, the web constantly changes. This is evident by some browsers that have a release cycle of just six weeks. Unfortunately, these rapid changes are not always designed with a security mindset, resulting in new attack vectors not observed before.

The MADWeb workshop aims to attract researchers who work on the intersection of browser evolution and web security. Our goal is to create and sustain a specialized venue for discussing any aspects of web security and privacy, such as the rapid changes to browsers from a security perspective, the security implications of current web technologies, how we can protect users now, and make browsers in the future more secure without hindering the evolution of the web.

Since MADWeb merged with the SecWeb workshop in 2025, we welcome ideas on extending the web with novel security mechanisms, better access interfaces (browsers), and disciplined programming abstractions to support secure web application development natively. Moreover, we invite contributions that propose provocative thoughts on re-envisioning (part of) the current web platform with security built-in by design.

We welcome work in progress and encourage junior researchers to explore new ideas before publication at a major security conference. We select papers based on their technical contributions and their potential to spark interesting discussions at MADWeb.

~~We currently accept (self-) nominations for the MADWeb 2025 PC. Please, fill this form to nominate yourself or someone else. The deadline to submit the form is Friday, November 1, 2024.~~

Our social media contacts are:

Please use the official hashtag #MADWeb for any public posts related to the workshop.

Important Dates

Paper submission: Thursday January 9, 2025 Anywhere-on-earth (AOE)
Acceptance notification (tentative): Thursday, January 30, 2025
Camera-ready deadline (tentative): Friday February 14, 2025
Workshop date: Friday February 28, 2025 (co-located with NDSS 2025)

Areas of Interest

Submissions are solicited in, but not limited to, the following areas:

Fingerprinting and tracking on the web
Browser security
Secure browser architectures
Security and privacy of emerging web technologies
Security of progressive web apps
Web authentication and authorization
Web protocol security
Security policies for the web
Language-based web security
Formal methods for web security
Measurement studies of online crime, fraud, and underground economies
Measurement studies of web security & privacy issues
Privacy-enhancing technologies for the web
Machine learning and AI applications for a secure web
Data-driven web security and malware detection
Anti-phishing technologies
Detection of bots and crawlers/scrapers
DNS security and privacy
Unethical and malicious activity on the web
Digital forensics for the web

Submission Instructions

All papers must be written in English. Papers must be formatted for US letter size (not A4) paper in a two-column layout, with columns no more than 9.25 in. high and 3.5 in. wide. The text must be in Times font, 10-point or larger, with 11-point or larger line spacing. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the templates provided by NDSS.

We invite both full papers and work-in-progress papers. Full papers should have no more than 10 pages in total (excluding references and appendices). Work-in-progress papers must have less than 6 pages (again, excluding references and appendices), and can discuss work-in-progress and novel ideas. Work-in-progress papers will be selected based on their potential to spark interesting discussions during the workshop and they will not be included in the formal proceedings of the workshop. Note that full papers might be accepted as Work-in-progress if they are deemed as not mature enough but may spark enough discussions at the workshop.

Submissions must be properly anonymized for double-blind review (please follow NDSS guidelines on paper anonymization).

Submission site https://madweb25.hotcrp.com/

Workshop Format

MADWeb will be co-located with NDSS 2025. MADWeb will be an on-site event.

One author of each accepted paper is expected to present the paper, in person, at the workshop. The format will be traditional conference-style research presentations with questions from the audience. Interactive and engaging presentations are welcome. As for the previous editions, we plan to give best paper and best presentation awards. Following notification to authors, more information will be provided regarding speaking times and other details.

The accepted papers will be made available on the workshop website and the workshop will have official proceedings. Publication in the proceedings is not mandatory and authors can choose to have their papers excluded from the official proceedings by selecting “No proceedings” during submission in HotCRP.

Program Committee Co-Chairs

Limin Jia, Carnegie Mellon University
Marco Squarcina, TU Wien
Yinzhi Cao, Johns Hopkins University

Program Committee

Behzad Ousat, Florida International University
Carl Magnus Bruhner, Linköping University
Cristian-Alexandru Staicu, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Darion Cassle, Amazon automated reasoning
Frederik Braun, Mozilla
Hsu-Chun Hsiao, National Taiwan University
Jianjia Yu, Johns Hopkins University
Kailun Yan, Shandong University
Karel Kubicek, Inria
Kostas Solomos, University of Illinois Chicago
Kyungchan Lim, University of Tennessee
Marius Steffens, Google
Merve Sahin, SAP
Ming Xu, National University of Singapore
Mir Masood Ali, University of Illinois Chicago
Muhammad Abu Bakar Aziz, Northeastern University
Musard Balliu, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Pedro Adão, Instituto Superior Técnico
Penghui Li, Columbia University
Peter Snyder, Brave Software
Philipp Beer, TU Wien
Ritik Roongta, New York University
Samuele Casarin, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Shuai Hao, Old Dominion University
Shubham Agarwal, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Simon Koch, TU Braunschweig
Steven Englehardt, DuckDuckGo
Tamara Rezk, Inria
Umar Iqbal, Washington University in St. Louis
Victor Le Pochat
Yi Han, F5 Networks
Yohan Beugin, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Steering Committee

Alexandros Kapravelos, North Carolina State University
Nick Nikiforakis, Stony Brook University
Oleksii Starov, Palo Alto Networks
Roberto Perdisci, University of Georgia
Zubair Shafiq, University of California, Davis
Aurore Fass, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security