June 6-10, 2022 Genoa

7th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy

Call For Papers


The IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (Euro S&P) is the European sibling conference of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (“Oakland”) conference. It is a premier forum for computer security and privacy research, presenting the latest developments and bringing together researchers and practitioners. We solicit previously unpublished papers offering novel research contributions in security or privacy, as well as Systematization of Knowledge papers that systematize previous results. EuroS&P is interested in all aspects of applied computer security and privacy. We especially encourage papers that are far-reaching and risky, provided those papers show sufficient promise for creating interesting discussions and usefully questioning widely-held beliefs. Papers without a clear connection to security or privacy will be considered out of scope and may be rejected without full review.

Broadened Scope

Euro S&P has traditionally focused on technical aspects of computer security and privacy research. This year we are expanding the scope of the symposium to include economic, ethical, legal, and social aspects and interdependencies of computer security and privacy.

We especially encourage submissions that address global aspects of computer security and privacy, including issues particular to parts of the world and communities that are often neglected. We are including experts in these areas in the program committee to ensure that such papers will receive high-quality reviews from well-qualified reviewers.

Systematization of Knowledge Papers

We solicit systematization of knowledge (SoK) papers that evaluate, systematize, and contextualize existing knowledge, as such papers can provide a high value to our community. Suitable papers are those that provide an important new viewpoint on an established, major research area; support or challenge long-held beliefs in such an area with compelling evidence; or present a convincing, comprehensive new taxonomy of such an area. Survey papers without such insights are not appropriate.

Submissions will be distinguished by the prefix "SoK:" in the title and a checkbox on the submission form. They will be reviewed by the full PC and held to the same standards as traditional research papers, except instead of emphasizing novel research contributions, the emphasis will be on their value to the community. Accepted papers will be presented at the symposium and included in the proceedings.

Requirement to Review

As was done for the 2021 symposium, submitting a paper to EuroS&P implies a commitment by the authors to serve as external reviewers, on request, for other papers submitted to the symposium. Each set of authors jointly submitting a paper will cumulatively be asked to contribute up to two external reviews. Requests for external reviews will be for the first round of reviewing (26 September – 3 November 2021).

This requirement exists to help alleviate the review load for PC members, to provide highly expert reviewers on a range of topics, and to provide training for the next generation of PC members (as we expect that many of these external reviewers will be students). If an external review is solicited, a good-faith effort must be made to provide a substantive and timely review; not doing so may risk rejection of the paper whose authors’ are asked to contribute a review. External reviewers will be held to the same standards of confidentiality as the Program Committee. Contact the program committee chairs if there are questions about this policy.

Revision Option

Following the model introduced in 2020, authors of papers that are not accepted may be invited to revise and resubmit their paper for a second round of reviews. Such papers invited for revision will be those for which the program committee sees a path for revision that is likely to lead to acceptance, even though the initial submission as evaluated cannot be accepted, with or without shepherding. If authors who are invited to do so wish to submit a revised paper, they must do so within four weeks of the notification. Revised papers will be re-reviewed by the same set of reviewers that reviewed them originally.

Neither acceptance with shepherding nor invitation to submit a revised paper implies that eventual acceptance is certain.

Best Paper Award

Outstanding paper(s) will be selected by the program committee for the best paper award. The award will be announced at the symposium.

Important Dates

All deadlines are Anywhere on Earth (AoE = UTC-12h).

Research Papers
Submission deadline 22 September 2021 (Wednesday)  
Early reject notification 8 November 2021 (Monday)
Rebuttal period 14 – 21 December 2021
Notification 18 January 2022 (Tuesday)
Submission of revised papers 16 February 2022 (Wednesday)
Camera ready deadline 9 March 2022 (Wednesday)
Conference 6–10 June 2022

Instructions for Paper Submission

Proactive Prevention of Harm

We expect authors to carefully consider and address the potential harms associated with carrying out their research, as well as the potential negative consequences that could stem from publishing their work. Failure to adequately discuss such potential harms within the body of the submission may result in rejection of a submission, regardless of its quality and scientific value.

Although risking to cause harm is sometimes a necessary and legitimate aspect of scientific research in computer security and privacy, authors are expected to document how they addressed and mitigated such risks. This includes, but is not limited to, considering the impact of the research on deployed systems, understanding the costs the research imposes on others, safely and appropriately collecting data, and following responsible disclosure practices. Papers should include a clear statement as to how the benefit of the research outweighs the potential harms, and how the authors have taken measures and followed best practices to ensure safety and minimize the potential harms caused by their research.

If the submitted research has potential to cause harm, and authors have access to an Institutional Review Board (IRB), we expect that this IRB was consulted appropriately and that its approval and recommendations are documented in the paper. We note that IRBs are not necessarily well-versed in computer security research and may not know the best practices and community norms in our field, so IRB approval does not absolve researchers from considering ethical aspects of their work. In particular, IRB approval is not sufficient to guarantee that the PC will not have additional concerns with respect to harms associated with the research.

We encourage authors to consult existing documentation, e.g., Common Pitfalls in Writing about Security and Privacy Human Subjects Experiments, and How to Avoid Them or the Menlo Report and existing Safety consultation entities, e.g., the Tor Safety Research Board. These can help in thinking about potential harms, and in designing the safest experiments and disclosure processes.

Open Science Expectations

Our expectation for Euro S&P is that researchers will maximize the scientific and community value of their work by making it as open as possible. This means that, by default, all of the code, data, and other materials (such as survey instruments) needed to reproduce your work described in an accepted paper will be released publicly under an open source license. Sometimes it is not possible to share work this openly, such as when it involves malware samples, data from human subjects that must be protected, or proprietary data obtained under agreement that preclude publishing the data itself. All submissions should therefore include a clear statement on Data Availability that explains how the artifacts needed to reproduce their work will be shared, or an explanation of why they will not be shared. The Program Chairs will hold authors to the commitments made in their submissions, and papers that fail to satisfy these commitments may be removed from the conference.

Duplicate Submission, Plagiarism, and Withdrawal

All submissions must be original work. Plagiarism (whether of others or self) will be grounds for rejection. The submission must clearly document any overlap with previously published or simultaneously submitted papers from any of the authors. Failure to point out and explain overlap will be grounds for rejection.

Simultaneous submission of the same or substantially similar paper to another venue with proceedings or a journal is not allowed and will be grounds for automatic rejection.

Anonymous Submission

Papers must be submitted in a form suitable for anonymous review: no author names or affiliations may appear on the title page, and papers 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. References should only be blinded in the (unusual) case that a third-person reference is infeasible. Contact the program chairs if you have any questions. Papers that are not properly anonymized may be rejected without review.

The purpose of anonymous submissions is to give reviewers the chance to read the paper without being biased by knowing the authors. Hence authors are required to ensure that the paper they submit does not, within reason, leak their identity.

However, the process of anonymous submission is considered to be cooperative, not adversarial. Authors should not put explicit clues to their identity in the paper or otherwise purposefully deanonymize themselves to reviewers. Authors who think disclosing revealing aspects of their identities or setting would be important for positioning the paper, should consult with the PC chairs on how to do this in their submission. Reviewers are trusted to not actively look for the identity of authors, for instance by searching the internet for the paper title. By policy, authors may post their paper to public “preprint” archives (including arxiv) before, during, or after the review period.

The Program Chairs will reject papers that, in their sole judgement, blatantly violate the requirement for author anonymity.

Reviews from Prior Submissions

For papers that were previously submitted to, and rejected from, another conference, authors are required to submit a separate document containing the (anonymized, but otherwise unedited) prior reviews along with a description of how those reviews were addressed in the current version of the paper. Authors are only required to include reviews from the last time the paper was submitted. Authors who try to circumvent this rule (e.g., by changing the title of the paper without significantly changing the contents) may have their papers rejected without further consideration, at the discretion of the PC chairs.

Page Limit and Formatting

Papers shall not exceed 13 pages of body text, with unlimited additional pages for references and appendices. Reviewers are explicitly not expected to read the appendices while deciding whether to accept or reject the paper.

Papers must be typeset in LaTeX in A4 format (not "US Letter") using the IEEE conference proceeding template we supply eurosp-2022-template.zip. We recommend using LaTeX, and suggest you first compile the supplied LaTeX source as is, checking that you obtain the same PDF as the one supplied. Then, write your paper into the LaTeX template, replacing the boilerplate text. Please do not use other IEEE templates. Failure to adhere to the page limit and formatting requirements can be grounds for rejection.

Submissions must be in Portable Document Format (.pdf). Authors should pay special attention to unusual fonts, images, and figures that might create problems for reviewers. Your document should render correctly in Adobe Reader XI and when printed in black and white.

Submissions failing to conform to the submission guidelines risk rejection without review.

Conference Submission Server

Papers must be submitted at https://eurosp2022.hotcrp.com/ and may be updated at any time until the submission deadline expires.

Publication and Presentation

Authors are responsible for obtaining appropriate publication clearances. One of the authors of the accepted paper is expected to present the paper at the conference. We are expecting to hold an in person conference and that authors will be able to travel to the conference to present their paper, but will make allowances for remote presentation in cases where all authors of a paper have legitimate reasons they are unable to attend in person.

For more information, contact the program chairs at: eurosp2022-pc-chairs@ieee-security.org