ndss-workflow

NDSS Workflow

One symposium, two entrances. NDSS 2027 accepts papers through a summer cycle and a fall cycle, each a complete two-round review pipeline, both feeding the same week in Seoul (22-26 March 2027). Plan against the cycle you can actually win, not the one that arrives first.

The 2027 skeleton (verified 2026-07-08; always recheck the live CFP)

As of 2026-07-08 the summer cycle is between rebuttal and notification; the fall deadline is roughly six weeks out. Registration for Seoul opens in October 2026 (Internet Society announcement) — for many teams the 2027 edition also means visas and long-haul travel budgets that San Diego never required. Start that paperwork at acceptance, not at camera-ready.

Backward plan from a fall submission

Aug 19  paper deadline (AoE)          ── freeze everything
Aug 12  full-draft freeze              ── format, anonymity, ethics-section passes only
Aug 05  internal red-team read         ── someone plays the Round-1 reviewer
Jul 29  evaluation freeze              ── last new experiment; start writing results
Jul 15  disclosure clock check         ── vendor notifications sent early enough that
                                          "we disclosed" is true at submission time
Jul 08  (today) go/no-go               ── fit test done, adversary model written,
                                          headline experiment already running

The item teams misplace is the disclosure clock: responsible disclosure has latency measured in weeks, and the CFP expects reporting (or a concrete plan) for high-impact vulnerabilities. A finding made on August 10 forces an uncomfortable choice; a finding made in July does not.

Choosing the cycle

• Enter the earliest cycle whose backward plan closes with the evaluation done, not projected. A thin submission is worse than a late one here, because a rejection blocks major-overlap resubmission in the other 2027 cycle.
• The rebuttal window is short and fixed (Oct 8-10 for fall). Check coauthor availability during those exact days before committing.
• A Major Revision outcome converts the calendar: you get reviewer-specified revision tasks and a resubmission window (dates 待核实 — confirm on notification). Budget the post-notification month as working time, not celebration time.

The big-four year, seen from the NDSS seat

The four flagship deadlines interleave, and NDSS's late-summer fall deadline sits where papers rejected from the S&P and CCS spring/summer cycles and the USENIX Security year naturally land. Two honest rules for riding this calendar:

1. Retargeting without revision is re-rejection. Reviewer pools overlap heavily across the big four; a resubmission that ignores its previous reviews often meets the same people. Fold in the fixes, and re-frame for NDSS's networked-adversary lens rather than doing a logo swap.
2. NDSS is a venue, not a fallback tier. Its acceptance bar is a peer of the other three; a paper that was thin at S&P is thin here too. What legitimately changes is fit — protocol, web, DNS, and distributed-infrastructure work often reads better to an NDSS PC than it did wherever it bounced.

Running the year

• Track each paper as a state machine: drafting → submitted → round-2 | early-reject → rebuttal → accept | minor-rev | major-rev | reject, with an owner and a next-action per state. The review-process skill details what each state means.
• On early reject (with Round-1 reviews in hand): route to the next venue on the routing table in ndss-topic-selection, after folding in the reviews. The same-edition door is closed; the 2028 door is not.
• On accept / minor revision: fork immediately into camera-ready (January 6 is far but the artifact-evaluation opt-in is near — see ndss-artifact-evaluation) and logistics (registration, visas, who presents).
• Keep the per-author six-submission cap visible on the group's board each cycle; it binds collaborations with many shared authors sooner than people expect.

Output format

[Cycle chosen] summer / fall / next edition — one-line justification
[Backward plan] table of dated freezes ending at the AoE deadline
[Disclosure clock] green / yellow / red + earliest safe submission date
[Rebuttal window] coauthors confirmed available? yes/no
[Post-decision branches] accept / minor / major / reject → owner + next action each
[Logistics] Seoul registration, visa lead time, presenter