Submission Policies
Important: Note that some past USENIX Security Symposia have had different policies and requirements, please read the following text carefully.
Submissions are due by Thursday, February 16, 2017, 5:00 p.m. PST (hard deadline). All submissions will be made online via the Web form. Do not email submissions. Submissions should be finished, complete papers, and we may reject papers without review that have severe editorial problems (broken references, egregious spelling or grammar errors, figures, etc.).
Paper submissions should be at most 13 typeset pages, excluding bibliography and well-marked appendices. These appendices may be included to assist reviewers who may have questions that fall outside the stated contribution of the paper on which your work is to be evaluated or to provide details that would only be of interest to a small minority of readers. There is no limit on the length of the bibliography and appendices but reviewers are not required to read any appendices so the paper should be self-contained without them. Once accepted, papers must be reformatted to fit in 18 pages, including bibliography and any appendices. The submission must be formatted in 2 columns, using 10-point Times Roman type on 12-point leading, in a text block of 6.5”x9”, on 8.5”x11” (letter-sized) paper. If you wish, please make use of USENIX's LaTeX template and style files when preparing your paper for submission. Failure to adhere to the page limit and formatting requirements can be grounds for rejection.
Conflicts of Interest
The program co-chairs require cooperation from both authors and program committee members to prevent submissions from being evaluated by reviewers who have a conflict of interest. During the submission process, we will ask authors to identify members of the program committee with whom they share a conflict of interest. This includes: (1) anyone who shares an institutional affiliation with an author at the time of submission, (2) anyone who was the advisor or advisee of an author at any time in the past, or (3) anyone the author has collaborated or published with in the prior two years. For other forms of conflict, authors must contact the chairs and explain the perceived conflict.
Program committee members who are conflicts of interest with a paper, including program co-chairs, will be excluded from both online and in-person evaluation and discussion of the paper by default.
Early Rejection and Rebuttals
Papers will receive a first round of reviews. Papers marked as early reject will not be considered further. The authors of papers not rejected early will receive the ability to provide a short rebuttal that will be considered in subsequent discussions. Authors' rebuttals must clearly and explicitly identify concrete issues with factual statements in the initial reviews, or provide clarification to explicit reviewer questions.
Anonymous Submission
The review process will be double blind. Papers must be submitted in a form suitable for anonymous review: no author names or affiliations may appear on the title page and authors should avoid revealing their identity in the text. When referring to your previous work, do so in the third person, as though it were written by someone else. Only blind the reference itself in the (unusual) case that a third-person reference is infeasible. Papers that are not properly anonymized may be rejected without review.
Facebook Internet Defense Prize
The Internet Defense Prize recognizes and rewards research that meaningfully makes the internet more secure. Created in 2014, the award is funded by Facebook and offered in partnership with USENIX to celebrate contributions to the protection and defense of the internet. Successful recipients of the Internet Defense Prize will provide a working prototype that demonstrates significant contributions to the security of the internet, particularly in the areas of prevention and defense. This award is meant to recognize the direction of the research and not necessarily its progress to date. The intent of the award is to inspire researchers to focus on high-impact areas of research.
You may submit your USENIX Security '17 paper submission for consideration for the Prize as part of the regular submission process. More details will be available here soon. Find out more about the Internet Defense Prize.
Human Subjects and Ethical Considerations
Submissions that describe experiments on human subjects, that analyze data derived from human subjects (even anonymized data), or that otherwise may put humans at risk should:
- Disclose whether the research received an approval or waiver from each of the authors’ institutional ethics review boards (e.g., an IRB).
- Discuss steps taken to ensure that participants and others who might have been affected by an experiment were treated ethically and with respect.
If the submission deals with vulnerabilities (e.g., software vulnerabilities in a given program or design weaknesses in a hardware system), the authors need to discuss in detail the steps they plan to take to address these vulnerabilities (e.g., by disclosing vulnerabilities to the vendors). The same applies if the submission deals with personally identifiable information (PII) or other kinds of sensitive data. If a paper raises significant ethical and legal concerns, it might be rejected based on these concerns.
Submission Instructions 
All submissions will be made online via the Web form. Do not email submissions. Submissions must be in PDF format. LaTeX users can use the "pdflatex" command to convert a LaTeX document into PDF format. Please make sure your submission can be opened using Adobe Reader. Please also make sure your submission, and all embedded figures, are intelligible when printed in grayscale.
All submissions will be judged on originality, relevance, correctness, and clarity. In addition to citing relevant published work, authors should relate their submission to any other relevant submissions of theirs in other venues that are under review at the same time as their submission to the Symposium. These citations to simultaneously submitted papers should be anonymized; non-anonymous versions of these citations must, however, be emailed to the program co-chairs at sec17chairs@usenix.org. Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, or plagiarism constitutes dishonesty or fraud. Failure to point out and explain overlap will be grounds for rejection. USENIX, like other scientific and technical conferences and journals, prohibits these practices and may take action against authors who have committed them. See the USENIX Conference Submissions Policy for details. Questions? Contact your program co-chairs, sec17chairs@usenix.org, or the USENIX office, submissionspolicy@usenix.org.
The program committee and external reviewers are required to treat all submissions as confidential. However, the program co-chairs or designated committee members may share submissions outside the program committee to allow chairs of other conferences to identify dual submissions.
Papers that do not comply with the submission requirements, including length and anonymity, or that do not have a clear application to security or privacy may be rejected without review. Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered.
Authors will be notified of acceptance by Friday, May 12, 2017. The final paper due date is Thursday, June 29, 2017, 9:00 p.m. PDT. Each accepted submission may be assigned a member of the program committee to act as its shepherd through the preparation of the final paper. The assigned member will act as a conduit for feedback from the committee to the authors.All papers will by default be available online to registered attendees before the symposium. If your accepted paper should not be published prior to the event, please notify production@usenix.org. The papers will be available online to everyone beginning on the first day of the symposium, August 16, 2017.
Specific questions about submissions may be sent to the program co-chairs at sec17chairs@usenix.org. The chairs will respond to individual questions about the submission process if contacted at least a week before the submission deadline.