Greetings from the General Chair

Greetings from the General ChaiTwo shifts define security work this year. Automated systems now find bugs in code we had treated as picked clean. Cryptography built to survive quantum attack is moving from selection to deployment. Welcome to the 27th World Conference on Information Security Applications (WISA 2026), where both land on the same program.

WISA has met every year since 2000, and it has stayed deliberately mid-sized. The room is small enough to find the author of the paper you just read. The program is broad enough to cover the field, from AI and blockchain-driven security to hardware and post-quantum cryptography to systems and firmware. Come with a question you cannot answer on your own.

Three talks anchor the program. Dr. Kyung Chul Jeong (National Security Research Institute) reports from inside Korea’s post-quantum standardization effort in “KpqC Competition, KpqC Algorithms, and Current Status.” Prof. Yan Shoshitaishvili (Arizona State University) asks why software we believed to be exhausted keeps yielding new bugs, in “Vulnerability Shapes, and Their Implications.” Prof. Ruoyu (Fish) Wang (Arizona State University) follows with “Goal-driven Binary Decompilation,” which argues that a decompiler has no single correct output, only output fit for a purpose. Read together, the three trace one line: tools are taking over work we used to call craft.

None of this assembles itself. Program Committee Co-Chairs Jongsung Kim (Kookmin University, Korea) and Haehyun Cho (Soongsil University, Korea) built the technical program, and the program committee reviewed it to the standard the venue implies. Organizing Committee Co-Chairs Seung-Hyun Seo (Hanyang University, Korea) and Jungsoo Park (Kangnam University, Korea) and their committee handle everything you will not notice unless it breaks. WISA 2026 is co-hosted by the Korea Institute of Information Security and Cryptology (KIISC), the National Intelligence Service (NIS), and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), sponsored by the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT), and co-sponsored by the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA), the National Security Research Institute (NSR), and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI).

The main track runs across 10 oral sessions and 2 poster sessions. We meet at MAISON GLAD on Jeju Island from August 26 to 28. Jeju in late August repays an extra day, and the best exchanges at WISA are rarely the scheduled ones. Bring your work, argue about it, and walk the island while you are here.

August 2026
Prof. Howon Kim (Pusan National University, Korea)
Dr. Se-woong Park (ETRI, Korea)
General Chairs of WISA 2026