CFP for Hardwear.io USA 2021 is Open (Tips and Tricks)

Last year I had the pleasure to give a talk about critical and standard-compliant Bluetooth flaws at the virtual edition of Hardwear.io 2020.

The organizers recently opened the call-for-papers (CFP) for Hardwear.io USA 2021 and asked me to share my take on why you would want to submit your work to Hardwear.io and few tips and tricks to improve the quality of your presentation. What follow are some random and personal thoughts that might be useful for somebody and might overlap with what is already suggested in the CFP 😄

Why one should submit?

1. Hardwear.io is (still) a “nichy” venue where you present to a relatively small but relevant audience of experts.

2. Hardwear.io’s audience is a mix of folks from academia and industry. This is very helpful as it allows to get feedback from different angles and hear more voices.

3. Hardwear.io enables to push the boundaries of interesting (yet less-mainstream) security topics such as embedded, industrial, hardware, and wireless systems.

4. Hardwear.io is not only about talks and conferences, there is whole community surrounding it that is active every day and from which you can get advice.

5. If you are a fan of merchandise (i.e., shirts, pins, magnets, …) then Hardwear.io is not going to disappoint you 🎉

Tips and Tricks to strengthen your submission

• Clearly scope you work to one (or more) submission topic(s)
• Keep a mix of technical and non-technical content
• The non-technical content is useful to let non-expert reviewers appreciate your work (i.e., what you did)
• The technical part is needed to convince the expert reviewers that you actually did what you are presenting (i.e., how you did it)
• Make sure that other than explaining “what” you did and “how” you did it, you are also showing “why” your submission is important, needed, novel, and interesting.
• Look at the TIPS FOR SUBMITTING on the CFP