ieeesp-writing-style

IEEE S&P Writing Style

Use this for drafting and revision passes. The controlling constraint is

S&P's round structure: first-round reviewers cut papers **without a

rebuttal** (ieeesp-review-process), so the paper's first two pages must

survive a professional skeptic reading alone, unaided, and slightly tired.

The first-round survival test

By the end of page 2, a reviewer must be able to answer:

1. Who is the adversary? Capabilities, access, and what winning means.
2. What is the claim? One sentence, bounded: "we show an attacker with

<access> can <effect> on <target class>, demonstrated on <n> systems."

1. What is the evidence? The map: which section demonstrates, which

measures, which proves.

1. Why now / why hard? What made this un-done until this paper.
2. Was it done responsibly? One early signal — disclosure initiated,

IRB obtained — expanded later.

A draft that spends page 1 on the importance of cybersecurity fails this

test; Oakland reviewers assume importance and grade specificity.

Threat model as a load-bearing section

The threat model is not scene-setting — every later claim is evaluated

against it:

• State capabilities and non-capabilities ("the attacker cannot observe

physical access patterns"); reviewers probe boundaries you leave implicit.

• Justify realism with citations to incidents or measurements, not

intuition.

• Keep one threat model. Papers that quietly strengthen the adversary in

§5 to make the defense interesting get caught in reviewer discussion.

• For defenses: state the adaptive adversary — one who knows the design —

and point to where that adversary is evaluated.

Claim calibration table

| Overclaim | Calibrated form |

|---|---|

| "Our defense stops X attacks" | "blocks all X instances in our corpus (n=…); adaptive variants in §6.3" |

| "The first work to…" | "the first demonstration on production systems of…" (and verify) |

| "Devastating real-world impact" | measured impact + affected-population estimate + fix status |

| "Provably secure" | "secure under <model> against <adversary class> (Thm 2)" |

| "Negligible overhead" | "<n>% median overhead on <workload> (Fig 7)" |

The pattern: every security adjective is replaced by a boundary plus a

pointer. This is also rebuttal insurance — calibrated claims leave less for

reviewers to dispute.

SoK voice is a different register

An SoK: paper argues a thesis about the literature: the organizing claim

("defenses in this area implicitly assume X, and the assumption fails")

appears on page 1 like any other claim, the taxonomy is the evidence, and

the systematization must earn its verbs — compare, reconcile,

invalidate — not just survey. Per the CFP, value to the community is the

review criterion; a section explicitly stating what practitioners and

researchers should do differently is the strongest close.

Compression for 13 compsoc pages

Two-column IEEE compsoc punishes sprawl. Cuts that preserve the argument,

in order:

1. Background that a security-generalist PC member already knows (they know

what ASLR is; they need your bypass's delta).

1. Repeated attack-flow narration — one figure with a numbered walkthrough

replaces a page of prose.

1. Per-experiment methodology boilerplate — one Evaluation Setup subsection,

referenced thereafter.

1. Defensive hedging paragraphs — one Limitations subsection beats hedges

scattered through every section.

Revision pass, one command per pass:
pass 1: page-2 test — answers to the 5 questions all present? mark gaps
pass 2: grep -n "first\|novel\|significant\|devastating\|completely" body.tex
        → each hit: boundary + pointer, or delete
pass 3: threat-model diff — list every capability §4–§7 assumes;
        confirm each appears in §2
pass 4: read only topic sentences aloud — does the argument survive?

House conventions worth matching

• Present tense for the system and attack ("the attack proceeds in three

stages"); past tense for what you measured.

• Third-person self-citation everywhere in the anonymous version.
• Numbered attack stages and named components; reviewers reference "stage 2"

and "the monitor" in discussion — make that easy.

• Figures readable in grayscale at print size; compsoc columns are narrow.

Output format

[Page-2 test] adversary ✓/✗ · claim ✓/✗ · evidence map ✓/✗ · why-now ✓/✗ · ethics signal ✓/✗
[Threat model] boundaries explicit? drift across sections? <findings>
[Claim audit] <n> uncalibrated claims with locations>
[Compression] current <n> pp → 13 pp plan: <cut list in order>
[Register] research / SoK — voice matches? <note>