CONFERENCE DATES:

The 13th USENIX Security Symposium will be held at the Town & Country Resort and Convention Center in San Diego, CA, August 9-13, 2004.

• Submission deadline: February 1, 2004, 11:59 p.m. PST
• Notification to authors: March 31, 2004
• Camera-ready final papers due: May 18, 2004

SUBMISSION DETAILS:

Here is an elaboration on the Call For Papers as it pertains to refereed papers:

• Authors must submit a mature paper. Any incomplete sections (there shouldn't be many) should be outlined in enough detail to make it clear that they could be finished easily.

• The final paper should ideally be between 8 and 16 pages.

• Electronic submissions must be in PDF format (e.g., processed by Adobe's Acrobat Distiller). In order to make your PDF actually portable, we request that you follow the NSF Fastlane guidelines for preparing PDF. Please make sure your submission can be opened using Adobe Acrobat 4.0.

• Papers should be formatted in 2 columns, using 10 point Times Roman type on 12 point leading, in a text block of 6.5" by 9".

• Your paper must be formatted to fit an 8.5x11 inch (US Letter) page.

• If your paper is missing figures, tables, or any other illustrations, please indicate this prominently in your paper and contact sec04chair@usenix.org before the submission deadline.

• LaTeX users should use the USENIX style file (usenix.sty).

• The Web submission form, which will be available on this Web site, requires the authors to provide the following information:
  • The title and authors of the manuscript.
  • The name of one author who will serve as a contact, with regular and electronic mail addresses, daytime and evening telephone numbers, and a fax number.
  • An indication of which, if any, of the authors are full-time students.

• All submissions will be acknowledged.

• All submissions will be judged on originality, relevance, and correctness. 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. Camera-ready final papers are due on May 18, 2004.

• Prizes may be awarded for Best Paper and Best Student Paper.

• Specific questions about submissions may be sent to the program chair via email to: sec04chair@usenix.org.

WHAT KINDS OF PAPERS DOES USENIX PUBLISH?

The most important thought to keep in mind when deciding whether to submit a paper is "what will the audience or readers learn from my paper?" We don't expect every paper to report on a major breakthrough, but we do look for something new, potentially useful, and not entirely obvious. Think about how different your work is from previously published papers; it may be good work but if there is nothing new to learn, it isn't worth reading (or writing) a paper about it. Think about how other people might find your work useful; can they apply what you are teaching them to their own systems? And, does your work really improve upon the previous state of the art? Or does it show how other people have been confused? "Negative results" that contradict the conventional wisdom are often more important than positive results.

Trying to decide if something is non-obvious isn't easy (patent lawyers make lots of money arguing about this), and sometimes the best ideas seem obvious in hindsight; but if lots of people have done the same thing, and you are simply the first person to have considered writing a paper about it, perhaps it's too obvious.

Again, when you are writing your paper, keep in mind "what do I intend to teach the reader?" That means keeping the paper focused on one or a few main points. Don't try to cram too many big issues into the paper, and don't fill it up with irrelevant details. But do include enough background for the reader to understand why your problem is important, how your work relates to previous work in the field, and how it might fit into a practical system. Also, provide enough detail for the reader to put your performance measurements in context. It is vitally important to provide a good bibliography, both so that you give proper credit to previous work, and so that a reader can know where to turn to find additional background information. The program committee will not look kindly on a paper if the author doesn't appear to be familiar with the current literature.