Submitting Papers

How and Where to Submit Refereed Papers   

Important: Note that some past USENIX Security Symposia have had different anonymity policies and page limits.

Papers are now due by Friday, February 28, 2014, at 4:59 p.m. EST (extended deadline). All submissions will be made online via the Web form. Submissions should be finished, complete papers.

Paper submissions should be at most 13 typeset pages, excluding bibliography and well-marked appendices. There is no limit on the length of the bibliography and appendices, but reviewers are not required to read them. Once accepted, papers must be reformatted to fit in 16 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” by 9”, on 8.5”x11” (letter-sized) paper. If you wish, please make use of the LaTeX file and style file available here when preparing your paper for submission.

Blind Review and Unblinding

Paper submissions 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.

This year, we are using a hybrid approach to double-blind review. While submissions will remain anonymous during the review process, authors’ names and affiliations will be revealed to the reviewers after the reviews are received, but before the program committee meeting. USENIX Security followed a single-blind reviewing process (anonymity explicitly disallowed) for its first two decades of symposia. The double-blind process was introduced in 2011 to increase reviewing fairness by reducing actual and perceived bias. However, it has become apparent that authors can also be unfairly penalized when reviewers make inadvertent assumptions about authorship of related work. Unblinding prior to the PC meeting also provides transparency to mitigate potential abuses in which committee members end up advancing the cause of a paper with which they have a conflict (e.g., a paper from a close colleague). Borrowing from the approach of PLDI, reviewers can now correct their reviews if they indeed have penalized the authors inappropriately. In order to ensure transparency and determine the effectiveness of this approach, the chair will measure the changes to paper outcomes that result from unblinding.

Human Subjects

Papers that describe experiments on human subjects, or that analyze non-public data derived from human subjects (even anonymized data), should disclose whether an ethics review (e.g., IRB approval) was conducted and discuss steps taken to ensure that participants were treated ethically. Contact the program chair at sec14chair@usenix.org if you have any questions.

How and Where to Submit

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 chair at sec14chair@usenix.org. Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, or plagiarism constitutes dishonesty or fraud. USENIX, like other scientific and technical conferences and journals, prohibits these practices and may take action against authors who have committed them. Program committee members will be instructed not to reject a paper solely on the basis of the existence of an unrefereed technical report, short workshop paper, job talk, or poster by the author. Program committee members have pledged to the PC chair to provide constructive and positive reviews. See the USENIX Conference Submissions Policy for details. Questions? Contact your program chair, sec14chair@usenix.org, or the USENIX office, submissionspolicy@usenix.org.

Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered. Accepted submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the USENIX Security ’14 Web site; rejected submissions will be permanently treated as confidential. Papers that do not comply with the submission requirements, including length and anonymity, may be rejected without review.

Authors will be notified of acceptance by Friday, May 9, 2014. The final paper due date is Tuesday, July 8, 2014, 8:59 p.m. EDT (firm deadline). 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 20, 2014.

Specific questions about submissions may be sent to the program chair at sec14chair@usenix.org. The chair will respond to individual questions about the submission process if contacted at least a week before the submission deadline. Please contact the chair’s assistant Jessica Patterson at 734-936-8875 (USA) if you do not receive an email response within a couple business days (perhaps a spam filter ate it).