ieeesp-submission

IEEE S&P Submission

Use this as the final audit before a paper enters an S&P cycle on HotCRP.

S&P's desk-reject rules are unusually mechanical — page counts, ORCID

matching, and registration completeness are enforced without review — so

most preventable losses happen in the upload week, not in review.

The two-deadline structure

An S&P cycle has a registration deadline and a paper deadline about a

week apart, and the registration is binding: title, full abstract, complete

author list, ORCIDs, and conflicts are frozen when registration closes

(cycle1.sp2027.ieee-security.org/deadlines, checked 2026-07-08). Audit

registration as its own deliverable:

• Every author has an ORCID whose email and name match the HotCRP record

— the 2027 CFP desk-rejects papers that violate this.

• The abstract entered at registration is the real abstract, not a

placeholder; it routes reviewers and cannot be swapped later.

• Conflicts are declared per the current CFP's conflict definition; both

missing and fabricated conflicts are chair-level problems.

• The Ethics Considerations field is filled with substance at

registration time (see ieeesp-review-process for how the REC uses it).

• SoK papers have the SoK: title prefix and the SoK checkbox — one

without the other misroutes reviewing.

Format gate

| Rule (2027 CFP, checked 2026-07-08) | Enforcement |

|---|---|

| ≤ 13 pages of body text | Over-length ⇒ rejected without review |

| ≤ 5 further pages, references + appendices only | Same |

| Hard ceiling 18 pages total | Same |

| Everything past page 13 clearly marked as appendix | Reviewer-visible violation |

| IEEE "compsoc" conference-proceedings LaTeX template | Tampering ⇒ desk-level flag |

| Anonymized submission | Identity leak ⇒ desk reject |

Two S&P-specific implications. Reviewers are **not required to read

appendices**, so a proof, an ablation, or the adaptive-attack evaluation that

the acceptance case depends on must live in the first 13 pages. And the

compsoc template's two-column layout eats wide tables and long listings —

compress artifacts early, not on deadline night.

Anonymization with security-paper edges

Security submissions leak identity in ways generic checklists miss:

• Disclosure trails — "we reported this to Vendor X in March" plus a CVE

number can uniquely identify the reporting group; write disclosure evidence

in venue-neutral terms ("the affected vendors were notified on <date>;

identifiers omitted for anonymity") unless the current CFP says otherwise.

• Artifact hostnames and scan origins — measurement infrastructure IPs,

institutional network names in traces, and cloud project IDs in scripts.

• Self-citations go in the third person, per the CFP.
• PDF metadata, embedded fonts from institutional templates, and figure

source paths (/home/<user>/...) all deanonymize.

# Mechanical pass before upload
pdfinfo paper.pdf | grep -iE 'author|creator'        # metadata
pdftotext paper.pdf - | grep -inE 'our (prior|previous) work|we reported|CVE-20'
grep -rniE '(\.edu|\.ac\.|corp)/|/home/[a-z]' figures/ scripts/ || true

Upload-week order of operations

1. Freeze the threat model and claims; no new results after this point.
2. Run the anonymization sweep above on the PDF and any linked artifact.
3. Verify page arithmetic: body ends on or before p.13, total ≤ 18, appendix

pages labeled.

1. Complete registration: authors, ORCIDs, conflicts, abstract, Ethics

Considerations, SoK checkbox if applicable.

1. Upload the paper; re-download from HotCRP and re-check the rendered PDF —

font substitution has broken compsoc submissions before.

1. Confirm the HotCRP abstract matches the PDF abstract.

Desk-reject triage

| Trigger | Repairable after deadline? |

|---|---|

| Missing/mismatched ORCID for any author | No — desk reject |

| Body text past page 13 or total > 18 | No — rejected without review |

| Author list change after registration | No — frozen |

| Identity leak in PDF or artifact | No |

| Weak Ethics Considerations entry | No new entry; damage lands in review/REC |

| Thin adaptive-attack evaluation | Review-stage damage; fix before, not after |

Output format

[S&P upload readiness] Ready / Needs fixes / Not ready
[Registration] authors+ORCIDs ✓/✗ · abstract ✓/✗ · conflicts ✓/✗ · ethics field ✓/✗
[Format] body ≤13 ✓/✗ · total ≤18 ✓/✗ · compsoc ✓/✗ · appendix marked ✓/✗
[Anonymity] pdf metadata / disclosure trail / artifact origins: <findings>
[Highest desk-reject risk] <one item>
[Fix order] <ordered list before the registration deadline>