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

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 ; 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.
4. Complete registration: authors, ORCIDs, conflicts, abstract, Ethics Considerations, SoK checkbox if applicable.
5. Upload the paper; re-download from HotCRP and re-check the rendered PDF — font substitution has broken compsoc submissions before.
6. Confirm the HotCRP abstract matches the PDF abstract.

Desk-reject triage

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>