The Tenth Midwest Security Workshop (MSW 10) will be held at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN and is tentatively scheduled for October 18th, 2025. Please join our mailing list if you want to make sure to hear updates about MSW 10 and future events.
The Ninth Midwest Security Workshop (MSW 9) was held at Purdue University on Saturday, November 16th, 2024. We had 306 registrants for this year's event from 19 different institutions, including large delegations from Purdue, UIUC, IU-Bloomington, Wisconsin-Madison, UChicago, UIC, Northwestern, and UMich! We had a number of interactive activities on our agenda.
We thank our 2024 sponsors:
History and Overview:
The Midwest Security Workshop (MSW) began as a series of five workshops held from 2006–2008 with the goal of bringing together researchers in computer security and privacy from throughout the Midwestern United States. After a decade-long hiatus, MSW returned in 2018 at UIUC and 2019 at the University of Chicago. A subsequent iteration was scheduled for Purdue University in 2020, but was sadly canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Following the pandemic, Mini MSW 8.5 was held on Saturday, October 28th, 2023 at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) in Chicago, IL, and MSW 9 is scheduled for Saturday, November 16th, 2024 at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN.
All MSW events are open to academic researchers (including faculty and students) who work on topics related to security and privacy and are based in the midwestern United States, broadly defined. Our goal for MSW is to help connect the midwestern community of security and privacy researchers. As a result, MSW events strongly discourage presenting past work. Instead, we try to seed new collaborations for future work and build community around shared research interests. We typically schedule MSW events to begin in the late morning so that most participating universities can attend the event as a day trip to minimize expenses.
Please join our mailing list if you want to make sure to hear announcements for MSW in future years.
To encourage broad participation, registration for the workshop is typically free. We typically provide lunch, as well as coffee and light snacks during breaks, but participants are on their own for covering the costs of all other food, transportation, accommodations (if applicable), and other logistics. Most attendees come to MSW as a day trip from their home institution, typically carpooling (and in some cases, renting large passenger vans to do so).
Mini MSW 8.5 was held on October 28th, 2023 at the University of Illinois Chicago (2023 agenda), co-chaired by Chris Kanich and Jason Polakis. We had 153 registered participants, including 21 faculty members, 126 students, and 6 postdocs and researchers. Attendees hailed from 14 different institutions.
MSW 7 was held April 13, 2019 at the University of Chicago (2019 agenda), chaired by Blase Ur. We had 230 registered participants, including 40 faculty members, 170 students, and 20 postdocs and researchers. Attendees hailed from 14 different institutions, including delegations of over ten participants from Purdue, UIUC, IU-Bloomington, UChicago, UIC, the University of Iowa, and the University of Michigan.
MSW 6 was held April 14, 2018 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2018 agenda), chaired by Adam Bates. Far exceeding our expectations based on the first five workshops, we had 214 registered participants, including over 40 faculty members and over 160 students. Attendees hailed from 15 different institutions.
Some photos from Mini MSW 8.5 (2023 @ UIC):
Some photos from MSW 7 (2019 @ UChicago):
Some photos from MSW 6 (2018 @ UIUC):
For a look back in time, the previous iterations of MSW were as follows: