ndss-supplementary

NDSS Supplementary Material

NDSS 2027's limit is 13 pages — but the boundary is unusual: the Ethics Considerations section, references, and appendices are all excluded from the count (CFP, checked 2026-07-08). That exclusion is an invitation to structure, not a loophole to exploit. The governing rule: the 13 pages must contain everything the accept/reject decision rests on, because nothing obliges a reviewer to read past them.

What goes where

The dependency test

For each appendix, ask: if a reviewer never opens this, does the body still justify acceptance?

• Yes → correctly placed. The body carries a self-contained summary (one sentence or one table row) with a forward pointer.
• No → decision-critical content has leaked out of the body. Promote the load-bearing part, demote something decorative instead.

The most common leak in security drafts: the only evidence that a defense survives adaptive attack sits in an appendix table. Round 2's discussion phase will treat unread appendix evidence as missing evidence.

Anti-patterns with the exclusions

• Ethics-section stuffing — parking methodology or results in the uncounted ethics section. Reviewers and the Ethics Review Board read it for ethics; off-topic content there signals gaming and invites scrutiny of everything else.
• The 40-page appendix — bulk unedited output dumped after the references. Appendices are written documents with headings and topic sentences, or they are noise.
• Ghost pointers — "see Appendix F" where F does not exist or answers a different question. Every pointer gets checked during the anonymity/format pass (ndss-submission).
• Anonymity decay — appendices and supplementary files are inside double-blind scope: screenshots with usernames, configs with institutional hostnames, and dataset paths leak identity exactly as body text would.

Suggested skeleton

p.1-13   BODY
         1 Introduction (first-page contract — see ndss-writing-style)
         2 Threat model & background
         3 Attack / system design
         4 Evaluation (headline results incl. adaptive-adversary summary)
         5 Discussion & limitations
         6 Related work
         7 Conclusion
uncounted
         Ethics Considerations        (immediately before references, per CFP)
         References
         A  Proofs / protocol details
         B  Full experimental matrix  (body shows the summary row)
         C  Additional case studies
         [camera-ready only] Artifact Appendix (2 pp., per Call for Artifacts)

Working the split during writing

1. Draft body-first; open an appendix only when a section exceeds its page budget and the overflow fails the dependency test.
2. Give every appendix a one-line contract at its top: what question it answers for which body claim.
3. At each freeze, re-run the dependency test — content drifts appendix-ward under page pressure, and load-bearing tables get pushed out silently.
4. Keep supplementary code/data links anonymized at submission (anonymous hosting; no institutional URLs); the de-anonymized versions return at camera-ready (ndss-camera-ready).

Output format

[Body self-sufficiency] pass/fail — decision-critical items found outside body
[Ethics section] scope-clean? content that belongs elsewhere
[Appendix inventory] per appendix: contract line + dependency-test verdict
[Pointer audit] dangling or mismatched forward references
[Anonymity sweep] identity leaks found in appendices/supplements