REST League 2027 is the 2^nd edition of the ultimate competition for automated black-box testing tools designed for RESTful APIs. The goal of REST League is to evaluate the performance of open-source and proprietary tools in finding bugs, security vulnerabilities, and logic flaws in real-world REST APIs without access to their source code.

This year, the competition will be part of the 49^th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2027), contributing to the Competition Track.

Participants submit their automated black-box testing tools to compete against a benchmark set of REST APIs. All tools in the competition will be provided with the OpenAPI specification (JSON/YAML) of the REST API to test, the API’s endpoint, and any required authentication material (e.g., API keys). Tools will not receive the API’s source code, database schema, or internal logs. The output expected from a tool is a sequence of HTTP requests/responses (the test cases actually executed against the API) that are used to compute the evaluation metrics. More details on the competition website.

Submission Guidelines

Submit your tool via EasyChair by 9 October, 2026. For organizational purposes, we kindly ask interested participants to submit a partial submission (with at least the tool name and authors) even if the tool is not yet ready. Submissions can be freely updated until 9 October, 2026.

1. Register: Register your tool by providing the tool name and authors via EasyChair
2. Prepare: Ensure your tool meets all requirements and is ready for deployment
3. Submit: Submit your tool via EasyChair, along with detailed setup and execution instructions

Upon submission, authors need to provide the tool source code and a Dockerfile enabling the building of a RESTgym-compliant container image. Authors of non-open-source tools or tools under specific intellectual property constraints are asked to directly contact the organizers.

Publication and Presentation

All authors of tools participating in the competition can submit a solution paper describing the tool’s approach used to tackle the competition problem. The paper should also discuss the evolution of the tool with respect to previous versions (if any).

Submissions will undergo a single-blind peer-review process to assess their technical correctness.

• Papers must be limited to 4 pages (including references)
• Papers must follow ICSE2027 formatting guidelines (details here)

Accepted solution papers will be included in the ICSE2027 proceedings and published by IEEE. Authors of accepted solution papers are required to present their tool during the competition conference session. The session will be part of the ICSE2027 program, scheduled from 25 April, 2027 to 1 May, 2027.

Timeline

REST League 2027 will be hosted by ICSE2027 in Dublin, Ireland, with the following schedule.

Organizers

REST League is organized by

• Michele Pasqua, Univ. of Verona @ michele.pasqua@univr.it
• Mariano Ceccato, Univ. of Verona @ mariano.ceccato@univr.it
• Sofia Mari, Univ. of Verona @ sofia.mari@univr.it
• Davide Corradini, Univ. of Luxembourg @ davide.corradini@uni.lu

If you have questions, feel free to reach out to us!