WOOT is the highest profile conference on "offensive security"†. The point of publishing in WOOT is the same as publishing in any other academic conference. WOOT has published, just in the past few years, Dawn Song, Matthew Green, Dan Boneh, Niels Provos, Thorsten Holz, Zakir Durumeric, Solar Designer, Joe Grand, Sergey Bratus, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, Dionysus Blazakis, Julien Vanegue, Rolf Rolles, Collin Mulliner, Stefan Savage, Travis Goodspeed, Stephen Checkoway, and Felix Lindner. Those are just the names I personally recognize; they've published many, many more than that.

Unlike in theoretical CS, a lot of work in WOOT's domain is done in the industry. So WOOT makes an effort to solicit contributions from the industry.

Does that make more sense?

† I hate that term, but look at the topics in the CFP to see what it means

I think I was reading too much into it, and conflating computer security research with hard science research. I assumed academic conferences required academics or academic students with peer-reviewed papers whose results would then be taken as serious scientific research, but it seems the opposite is more common. I'm still not really sure what the distinction between academic computer security research and industry computer security research is, other than one is more theoretical (?)

I don't understand why you're being so rude while trying to make a point.

The thing is technology companies, unlike pharmaceutical companies, automative companies, defence companies, or any other direct application of hard sciences, are more open to the idea of sharing their work with the rest of the community (academic or otherwise). People at Google for example has written highly cited papers about distributed systems, early compilers work has been largely influenced by industry (think FORTRAN). Even academics developed many ideas about their "academic" work while producing work in the industry. One example is the Norcroft compiler suite (first ARM compiler), is developed by two Cambridge academics and then lead to influential papers in compiler optimisations.

I think it is just the case that people in computer science do not look down on people who did not go through rigorous academic training. The barriers to entry for computer science in most areas is fairly low compared hard sciences because you do not need a fancy laboratory to get results.

Also you clearly have not even bothered to look through previous workshops more than half of the papers have university associations.

This science, unlike physics, or biology, is still at its infancy. People of all sort of backgrounds can contribute massively and they do so.

USENIX is peer reviewed just like every other academic conference. For each of the last ~8 years, you can go to the WOOT site and look at the program committee. The PC includes professors and university researchers, many of them renowned. I'm not sure what part of "high profile" I'm failing to get across here.

You forgot to put your † somewhere.

thx