Security '03 Author Guidelines
Please read these guidelines carefully. They were written to
help you give your submission its best possible chance to be
accepted. (As you know, the Program Committee can't accept
every paper submitted to the conference.) Generally speaking,
we are looking for papers that span a broad range of practical
issues in the field of Computer Security.
CONFERENCE DATES:
The 12th USENIX Security Symposium will be held at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C.,
August 4-8, 2003.
Dates for paper submissions:
- Submission deadline: January 27, 2003
- Notification to authors: March 20, 2003
- Camera-ready final papers due: May 13, 2003
SUBMISSION DETAILS:
Here is an elaboration on the Call For Papers as it pertains to refereed papers:
- Authors must submit a mature paper. Any incomplete sections (there shouldn't
be many) should be outlined in enough detail to make it clear that they could
be finished easily.
- The final paper should ideally be between 8 and 16 pages.
- Electronic submissions must be in PDF format (e.g. processed by
Adobe's Acrobat Distiller). In order to
make your PDF actually portable, we request that you follow the NSF Fastlane guidelines for preparing PDF. Please make sure your submission can be
opened using Adobe Acrobat 4.0.
- Your paper must be formatted to fit an 8.5x11 inch (US Letter) page. Please
leave enough room for top and bottom margins.
- If your paper is missing figures, tables, or any other illustrations, please
indicate this prominently in your paper and contact
sec03chair@usenix.org
before the submission deadline.
- LaTeX users should use the Usenix style file (usenix.sty)
- In general, we recommend authors use a two-column page layout and use Adobe
Times-Roman as their main font.
- The web submission form requires the authors to provide the following
information:
- The title and authors of the manuscript.
- The name of one author who will serve as a contact, with regular and
electronic mail addresses, daytime and evening telephone numbers,
and a fax number.
- An indication of which, if any, of the authors are full-time
students.
- All submissions will be acknowledged.
- All submissions will be judged on originality, relevance, and
correctness. Each accepted submission may be assigned a member
of the program committee to act as its shepherd through the
preparation of the final paper. The assigned member will act
as a conduit for feedback from the committee to the authors.
Camera-ready final papers are due on May 13, 2003.
- Prizes will be awarded for Best Paper and Best Student Paper.
- Specific questions about submissions may be sent to the program
chairs via email to:
sec03chair@usenix.org.
WHAT KINDS OF PAPERS DOES USENIX PUBLISH?
The most important thought to keep in mind when deciding whether
to submit a paper is "what will the audience or readers learn
from my paper?" We don't expect every paper to report on a
major breakthrough, but we do look for something new,
potentially useful, and not entirely obvious. Think about how
different your work is from previously published papers; it may
be good work but if there is nothing new to learn, it isn't
worth reading (or writing) a paper about it. Think about how
other people might find your work useful; can they apply what
you are teaching them to their own systems? And, does your work
really improve upon the previous state of the art? Or does it
show how other people have been confused? "Negative results"
that contradict the conventional wisdom are often more important
than positive results.
Trying to decide if something is non-obvious isn't easy (patent
lawyers make lots of money arguing about this), and sometimes
the best ideas seem obvious in hindsight; but if lots of people
have done the same thing, and you are simply the first person to
have considered writing a paper about it, perhaps it's too
obvious.
Again, when you are writing your paper, keep in mind "what do I
intend to teach the reader?" That means keeping the paper
focused on one or a few main points. Don't try to cram too many
big issues into the paper, and don't fill it up with irrelevant
details. But do include enough background for the reader to
understand why your problem is important, how your work relates
to previous work in the field, and how it might fit into a
practical system. Also, provide enough detail for the reader to
put your performance measurements in context. It is vitally
important to provide a good bibliography, both so that you give
proper credit to previous work, and so that a reader can know
where to turn to find additional background information. The
program committee will not look kindly on a paper if the author
doesn't appear to be familiar with the current literature.
Also, please see An Evaluation of the Ninth SOSP Submissions
-or-
How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper by
Roy Levin and David D. Redell, Ninth SOSP Program Committee Co-chairmen.
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