IEEE Security and Privacy Symposium 2026
(https://sp2026.ieee-security.org/)
San Francisco, CA, USA (Hilton San Francisco Union Square)
Conference Dates
5/18/26 - 5/21/26 (Symposium: 5/18/26 - 5/20/26, Workshops: 5/21/26)
Submission Dates
IEEE S&P 2026 has two submission cycles:
First Deadline
Abstract Submission: 5/29/25
Full Paper Submission: 6/5/25
Second Deadline
Abstract, Author, and COI Registration: 11/6/25
Full Paper Submission: 11/13/25
Note: All deadlines are 23:59:59 AoE (UTC-12). Abstract registration
is mandatory. Authors may not submit more than 6 papers per cycle.
Call for Papers (Full Text)
! The CFP has been updated since Cycle 1 !
Since 1980 in Oakland, the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy has been the premier forum for computer security research, presenting the latest developments and bringing together researchers and practitioners. We solicit previously unpublished papers offering novel research contributions in any aspect of security or privacy. Papers may present advances in the theory, design, implementation, analysis, verification, or empirical evaluation and measurement of secure systems. Theoretical papers must make a convincing case for the relevance of their results to practice.
Topics of interest include:
Applied cryptography
Attacks with novel insights, techniques, or results
Authentication, access control, and authorization
Blockchains and distributed ledger security
Cloud computing security
Cyber physical systems security
Distributed systems security
Economics of security and privacy
Embedded systems security
Formal methods and verification
Hardware security
Hate, Harassment, and Online Abuse
Human-centered security and privacy
Intrusion detection and prevention
ML - Methods for confidentiality and privacy of data in ML systems
ML - Methods for integrity and availability of ML systems
ML - Novel attacks on ML systems
ML - Verifying security and privacy properties of ML algorithms
Malware and unwanted software
Network security and measurement
Operating systems security
Privacy-enhancing technologies, anonymity, and censorship
Program and binary analysis
Protocol security
Security and privacy metrics
Security and privacy policies
Security architectures
Security for at-risk populations
Software supply chain security
Systems security
User studies for security and privacy
Web security and privacy
Wireless and mobile security/privacy
This topic list is not meant to be exhaustive; S&P is interested in
all aspects of computer security and privacy. Papers without a clear
application to security or privacy, however, will be considered out of
scope and may be rejected without full review.
Systematization of Knowledge Papers
As in past years, 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 and may be rejected without full review. 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, but they will be
accepted based on their treatment of existing work and value to the
community, and not based on any new research results they may
contain. Accepted papers will be presented at the symposium and
included in the proceedings. You can find an overview of recent SoK
papers at https://oaklandsok.github.io.
Submission Deadlines & Decisions
Similar to 2025, for each submission, one of the following decisions
will be made:
Accept: Papers in this category will be accepted for publication
in the proceedings and presentation at the conference. Within one
month of acceptance, all accepted papers must submit a camera-ready
copy incorporating reviewer feedback. The papers will immediately be
published, open access, in the Computer Society's Digital Library, and
they may be cited as "To appear in the IEEE Symposium on Security &
Privacy, May 2026".
Reject: Papers in this category are declined for inclusion in the
conference. Rejected papers must wait for one year, from the date of
original submission, to resubmit to IEEE S&P. A paper will be judged
to be a resubmit (as opposed to a new submission) if the paper is from
the same or similar authors, with a very similar intellectual
contribution, and a reviewer could write a substantially similar
summary of the paper compared with the original submission. A paper
that is completely rewritten and has a new presentation but the same
intellectual contribution is considered a resubmission. Small
extensions on the same paper or just slightly changing the angle of
presentation of the results is considered a resubmission.
Resubmissions or double-submissions to other conferences will result
in submission penalties to all the authors for more than one year.
Public Meta-Reviews: Similar to 2025, all accepted papers will be
published with a meta-review (< 500 words) in the final PDF that
lists: (a) the reasons the PC decided to accept the paper and (b)
concerns the PC has with the paper. Authors will be given the option
to write a response to the meta-review (< 500 words) which will be
published as part of the meta-review. Authors will be given a draft
meta-review at the time of acceptance. Authors will be given the
option of addressing some or all of the concerns within one review
cycle. A shepherd will remove concerns from the meta-review if they
are sufficiently addressed by the revisions.
The goal of this process is to provide greater transparency and to
better scope change requests made by reviewers. More information about
the reasons behind this change can be found on the 2024 IEEE S&P
website.
Note that under this acceptance process, there is no conditional
acceptance so papers submitted will be reviewed as is and accepted
based on the material that was submitted at the paper submission
deadline.
Symposium Event (Important Changes)
The number of papers accepted to IEEE S&P continues to grow
substantially each year. Due to conference venue limitations and
costs, each accepted paper will have: (a) a short talk presentation
(e.g., 5-7 minutes, length determined based on the number of accepted
papers) and (b) a poster presentation immediately following the talk
session containing the paper. All accepted papers are required to
present both a short talk and a poster.
Important Dates
All deadlines are 23:59:59 AoE (UTC-12).
First deadline
Abstract registration deadline: 5/29/25 mandatory
Paper submission deadline: 6/5/25
Early-reject notification: 7/21/25
Rebuttal period (interactive): 8/18/25 - 8/29/25
Rebuttal text due: 8/25/25
Acceptance notification: 9/9/25
Camera-ready deadline: 10/17/25
Second deadline
Abstract, author, and conflict-of-interest registration deadline: 11/6/25,
mandatory (This means full and complete abstract, complete list of
authors with their ORCIDs, and conflicts-of-interest declared on
HotCRP. Neither the abstract nor the author list can be changed
after the abstract registration deadline. Conflicts-of-interest
will be reviewed by the PC chairs and the authors will be given an
opportunity to address any discrepancies identified before the
paper submission deadline.)
Paper submission deadline: 11/13/25
Early-reject notification: 1/19/26
Rebuttal period (interactive): 2/12/26 - 2/23/26
Rebuttal text due: 2/17/26
Acceptance notification: 3/9/26
Camera-ready deadline: 4/17/26
Rebuttal Period
Papers reaching the second round of reviewing will be given an
opportunity to write a rebuttal to reviewer questions. The rebuttal
period will be interactive, and is separate from the meta-review
rebuttal given to accepted papers. Not all reviewers may choose to
interact with the authors during the interactive rebuttal.
Authors have the opportunity to exchange messages with the reviewers
and respond to questions asked. To this end, we will use HotCRP's
anonymous communication feature to enable a communication channel
between authors and reviewers. The authors should mainly focus on
factual errors in the reviews and concrete questions posed by the
reviewers. New research results can also be discussed if they help to
clarify open questions. More instructions will be sent out to the
authors at the beginning of the rebuttal period. Failure to follow the
instructions sent at the beginning of the rebuttal (for example
submitting rebuttals over the word count limit) will result in
immediate rejection. All papers rejected during the rebuttal period
must wait for one year, from the date of original submission, to
resubmit to IEEE S&P.
Resubmission of Rejected Papers
As with previous IEEE S&P symposia with multiple submission cycles,
rejected papers must wait one year before resubmission to IEEE S&P.
Instructions for Paper Submission
These instructions apply to both the research papers and
systematization of knowledge (SoK) papers. All submissions must be
original work; the submitter 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 paper to another
venue with proceedings or a journal is not allowed and will be grounds
for automatic rejection. Contact the program committee chairs if there
are questions about this policy.
Cap on number of submissions
Any author may not submit more than 6 papers per cycle. In the event
an author submitted more than 6 papers in a cycle, all the papers they
submitted in that cycle will be desk-rejected.
Anonymous Submission
Papers must be submitted in a form suitable for anonymous review: no
author names or affiliations (whether they are real or the default
fake names included in the IEEE template) may appear on the title
page, and papers should avoid revealing authors' identity in the
text. Authors should also take care in not including acknowledgments
that help identify them (e.g., funding information, names of
colleagues who gave feedback on the paper). When referring to their
previous work, authors are required to cite their papers in the third
person, without identifying themselves. In the unusual case in which a
third-person reference is infeasible, authors can blind the reference
itself.
When preparing the artifacts repository authors should take extra care
to not include authors' information in the repository or artifacts
content, so as not to break the anonymity of the paper
submission. Authors may want to consider using services such as
GitFront or Anonymous GitHub. Additionally, authors should make sure
to use account names and repository names that do not identify the
authors, and should remove any comments/text in the repository that
may directly identify the authors or the authors' institution.
Papers that are not properly anonymized may be rejected without
review. PC members who have a genuine conflict of interest with a
paper, including the PC Co-Chairs and the Associate Chairs, will be
excluded from evaluation and discussion of that paper.
While a paper is under submission to the IEEE Security & Privacy
Symposium, authors may choose to give talks about their work, post a
preprint of the paper to an archival repository such as arXiv, and
disclose security vulnerabilities to vendors. Authors should refrain
from widely advertising their results, but in special circumstances
they should contact the PC chairs to discuss exceptions. Authors are
not allowed to directly contact PC members to discuss their
submission.
The submissions will be treated confidentially by the PC chairs and
the program committee members. Program committee members are not
allowed to share the submitted papers with anyone, with the exception
of qualified external reviewers approved by the program committee
chairs. Please contact the PC chairs if you have any questions or
concerns.
Papers that are deskrejected because they do not follow the template
formatting rules or break anonymity without reviews can be resubmitted
at the next cycle. (Papers that break anonymity and are discovered
during the review process once reviews have been completed, must wait
for one year before being resubmitted to S&P.)
Artifacts
Papers are strongly encouraged to provide artifact repositories that
are anonymized as described above. Theoretical papers are strongly
encouraged to submit the proofs as artifacts on such repositories at
paper submission time as there will be no other possibility to provide
such proofs later during the review process.
Conflicts of Interest
During submission of an abstract, the submission site will request
information about conflicts of interest of the paper's authors with
program committee (PC) members. It is the full responsibility of all
authors of a paper to identify all and only their potential
conflict-of-interest PC members before the abstract registration
deadline, according to the following definition. A paper author has a
conflict of interest with a PC member when and only when one or more
of the following conditions holds (the option you should select on
HotCRP is listed within brackets):
[Co-author] The PC member is a co-author of the paper.
[Co-worker] The PC member has been a co-worker in the same company
or organization within the past two years.
For student interns, the student is conflicted with their
supervisors and with members of the same research group. If
the student no longer works for the organization, then they
are not conflicted with a PC member from the larger
organization.
[Institutional] The PC member has been affiliated with the same
academic institution (e.g., University, research institute) as one
of the co-authors within the past two years.
Ph.D students have a conflict with the University they graduated
from for 2 years after their graduation date.
[Research collaborator] The PC member has been a collaborator on a
research paper within the past two years. The definition of
"research paper" includes ongoing work, unpublished work, and
technical reports.
[Funding collaborator] The PC member has been a collaborator
(e.g., a coPI) on a funding grant within the past two years.
[Advisor] The PC member is or was the author's primary thesis
advisor, no matter how long ago.
[Advisee] The author is or was the PC member's primary thesis
advisor, no matter how long ago.
[Personal] The PC member is a relative or close personal friend of
the author.
For any other situation where the authors feel they have a conflict
with a PC member, they must explain the nature of the conflict via the
corresponding field in the HotCRP submission entry, such that the PC
chairs can review the conflict and confirm it is appropriate. The
program chairs will review declared conflicts. Papers with incorrect
or incomplete conflict of interest information as of the submission
closing time are subject to immediate rejection. Because it would not
be possible to handle conflicts of interest retroactively, changes to
the author list are not permitted after submission (see section on
Authorship below). Authors are responsible for reading the entire list
of PC members.
COI developed during the reviewing process: Authors starting new
collaborations during the review period should make all their new
collaborators aware that they have submitted papers to S&P and refrain
from starting such collaborations as they can create COI.
Research Ethics Committee
Similar to 2025, IEEE S&P 2026 has a research ethics committee (REC)
that will check papers flagged by reviewers as potentially including
ethically fraught research. The REC will review flagged papers and may
suggest to the PC Chairs rejection of a paper on ethical grounds. The
REC consists of members of the PC. Authors are encouraged to review
the Menlo Report for general ethical guidelines for computer and
information security research.
Ethical Considerations for Vulnerability Disclosure
Where research identifies a vulnerability (e.g., software
vulnerabilities in a given program, design weaknesses in a hardware
system, or any other kind of vulnerability in deployed systems), we
expect that researchers act in a way that avoids gratuitous harm to
affected users and, where possible, affirmatively protects those
users. In nearly every case, disclosing the vulnerability to vendors
of affected systems, and other stakeholders, will help protect
users. If a paper raises significant ethical and/or legal concerns, it
will be checked by the REC and it might be rejected based on these
concerns.
Authors are strongly recommended to disclose vulnerabilities in their
original submission. If that is not possible, authors should provide
details of why they have not disclosed the vulnerabilities yet, and
what is their disclosure plan. That is, the version of the paper
submitted for review must discuss in detail the steps the authors have
taken or plan to take to address these vulnerabilities.
Authors are required to disclose vulnerabilities no later than the
rebuttal deadline. If this is not possible, the authors should notify
the PC chairs by email as soon as possible. Longer disclosure windows
are at the discretion of the PC chairs and will only be considered in
exceptional situations.
Because there are no conditional accepts, reviewers can treat the lack
of disclosure of vulnerabilities as a concern that can lead to
rejection: reviewers need to make decisions based on the information
provided at the submission and rebuttal time. The PC chairs will be
happy to consult with authors about how this policy applies to their
submissions.
Note: Submitted papers should not include full CVE identifiers in
order to preserve the anonymity of the submission.
Ethical Considerations for Human Subjects Research
Submissions that describe experiments that could be viewed as
involving 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.,
IRB) if applicable.
Discuss steps taken to ensure that participants and others who
might have been affected by an experiment were treated ethically
and with respect.
If a submission deals with any kind of personal identifiable
information (PII) or other kinds of sensitive data, the version of the
paper submitted for review must discuss in detail the steps the
authors have taken to mitigate harms to the persons identified. If a
paper raises significant ethical and/or legal concerns, it will be
checked by the REC and it might be rejected based on these
concerns. The PC chairs will be happy to consult with authors about
how this policy applies to their submissions.
Ethics Considerations
All the papers must use a separate and well-marked section titled
"Ethics considerations" at the end of their paper to make the relevant
disclosures. If there are no Ethics considerations, the body text of
the section should be "None". This section can be placed before or
after the references and will not count towards the page limit for the
main body of the paper.
Financial and Non-financial competing interests
In the interests of transparency and to help readers form their own
judgement of potential bias, the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy
requires authors and PC members to declare any competing financial
and/or non-financial interests in relation to the work
described. Authors need to include a disclosure of relevant financial
interests in the camera-ready versions of their papers. This includes
not just the standard funding lines, but should also include
disclosures of any financial interest related to the research
described. For example, "Author X is on the Technical Advisory Board
of the ByteCoin Foundation," or "Professor Y is the CTO of
DoubleDefense, which specializes in malware analysis."
Page Limit and Formatting (Important Changes)
Submitted papers may include up to 13 pages of text and up to 5 pages
for references and appendices, totaling no more than 18 pages. All
text and figures past page 13 must be clearly marked as part of the
appendix. The final camera-ready paper must be no more than 18 pages,
although, at the PC chairs' discretion, additional pages may be
allowed. Reviewers are not required to read appendices. For SOK
papers, the references do not count towards the number of pages.
Submitted papers can not use additional pages at submission time
without the explicit approval of PC Chairs. Papers that are over the
allowed number of pages will be rejected without review.
Papers must be formatted for US letter (not A4) size paper. All
submissions must use the IEEE "compsoc" conference proceedings
template. LaTeX submissions using the IEEE templates must use
IEEEtran.cls version 1.8b with options "conference,compsoc." (That is,
begin your LaTeX document with the line
\documentclass[conference,compsoc]{IEEEtran}.). See the "IEEE Demo
Template for Computer Society Conferences" Overleaf template for an
example. We are not aware of an MS Word template that matches this
style.
Papers that fail to use the "compsoc" template (including using the
non-compsoc IEEE conference template), modify margins, font, or line
spacing, or use egregious space scrunching are subject to rejection
without review. Authors are responsible for verifying the paper format
(e.g., compare with the above linked Overleaf template). While HotCRP
provides some automated checking, the checks are limited. Note that
some LaTeX packages (e.g., \usepackage{usenix}) override the compsoc
formatting and must be removed.
Withdrawing Policy
A paper can be withdrawn at any point before the reviews have been
sent to the authors. Once the reviews have been sent to the authors
the paper can not be withdrawn.
Authorship Policy
Changes to the authorship list (adding, removing, reordering authors)
are not permitted after the abstract registration deadline. Once the
paper is accepted, the authors can request approval from the TPC
Chairs to make changes to the ordering or affiliation in justified
circumstances. If authors anticipate that they might change
affiliation during the time the paper is under submission it is
recommended to mark both the current and future institution as COI.
ORCID requirement: All authors are required to submit an ORCID number at abstract submission time. You can obtain an ORCID number here. ORCID numbers have to use emails that are identical with the ones used in HotCRP for the paper submission, and they have to have complete names. Papers that do not submit ORCID numbers for all authors and do not follow the rules above will be desk rejected.
Conference Submission Server
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.
Submission servers:
First deadline: https://cycle1.sp2026.ieee-security.org/
Second deadline: https://cycle2.sp2026.ieee-security.org/
IMPORTANT: The authors are responsible to have a draft submitted 24
hours before the deadline. Submissions that failed because the
submission server crashed either (a) within 24 hours of the submission
deadline or (b) after the submission deadline will not be
accepted. The PC Chairs will not respond to emails about this issue.
Publication and Presentation
Authors are responsible for obtaining appropriate publication clearances. One of the authors of the accepted paper is expected to register and present the paper at the conference.
Authors Responsibility
It is the responsibility of all authors to be familiar with the
conference CFP and the policies it specifies.
LLM Policy
As an IEEE conference, S&P follows the IEEE Policy about the use of
LLMs which can be found here:
https://pspb.ieee.org/images/files/PSPB/opsmanual.pdf
Additionally, papers submitted at S&P have to follow the following
policy. (This is based on the policy created by IEEE SaTML 2026).
Authors are permitted to use LLMs when preparing their paper. However,
while the conference does not ban authors from using LLMs or
researching their security and privacy properties, authors must (a)
carefully consider their decision to use LLMs and (b) are required to
disclose and motivate the use of LLMs in their submission. If the
authors choose to use LLMs in their work, they must use a separate and
well-marked section titled "LLM usage considerations" at the end of
their paper to make the relevant disclosures. This section can be
placed before or after the references and will not count towards the
page limit for the main body of the paper.
We ask that authors adhere to three key criteria with regards to their use of LLMs in the scientific process:
Originality: First, authors are responsible for the entire content of
their paper, including all text and figures. While any tool may be
used for writing, it is crucial that all content is accurate and
original, ensuring transparency and maintaining the integrity of the
research process. In particular, authors are responsible for the
thoroughness of their literature review and must determine relevant
prior work and cite it to ensure proper credit. If the authors have
used LLMs to improve their writing, they should state: 'LLMs were used
for editorial purposes in this manuscript, and all outputs were
inspected by the authors to ensure accuracy and originality.'
Transparency: Second, authors should carefully reason about the
implications of using LLMs in their work. If LLMs are integral to the
paper's methodology, their use should be explicitly detailed. Any idea
generated by an LLM should be independently developed and validated by
the authors. Furthermore, authors must elaborate on how they handled
limitations introduced in their work by their use of LLMs. Such
limitations could for instance include difficulties to obtain results
that are reproducible when the LLM used is not open sourced.
Responsibility: Third, authors should take care to develop LLMs (and
ML models in general) responsibly. Any data collection towards
training models should take into account relevant ethical
considerations such as consent and data holder rights, including
intellectual property. Authors also have to justify the need for the
environmental footprint of their experiments to achieve their goals
and support their methodology. We recognize calculating such a
footprint is a technical challenge in itself. We refer the authors to
the work of Lacoste et al. (https://mlco2.github.io/impact/) but
welcome to hear any other good references
(sp26-pcchairs@ieee-security.org). We emphasize that the goal here is
not to calculate the exact footprint but rather explain experimental
choices made as part of the scientific process (e.g., why was an LLM
necessary, why was a particular model size selected, how the authors
minimized the volume of queries made, which hardware was used to run
experiments).
Failure to comply with these rules is grounds for desk rejection
without further review of the submission and may be accompanied by a
submission ban for all the authors (for more than one year) at the
discretion of the PC chairs. We note that generative AI technology is
rapidly evolving. Authors are encouraged to reach out proactively to
the PC chairs should they face uncertainties about the above rules or
how they apply to their research.
Program Committee
PC Chairs
Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Northeastern University
Nicolas Papernot, University of Toronto and Vector Institute and
Google DeepMind
Contact: sp26-pcchairs@ieee-security.org