brycewang-stanford USENIX Security Supplementary Material
USENIX Security does not collect a separate supplement upload; everything textual travels in one PDF with a fixed geography, and everything executable lives at the locations named in the Open Science appendix. Placement is therefore a reviewing decision: material outside the 13-page body has no guarantee of being read. The layout below is the '26 rule set (checked 2026-07-08); confirm against the current CFP before restructuring a draft.
The four tiers and their reading guarantees
| Tier | Cap ('26) | Who reads it |
|---|---|---|
| Main body | 13 pages | Reviewers, fully — the only tier with a guarantee |
| Ethical Considerations appendix | ~1 page, mandatory | Reviewers and (when flagged) ethics scrutiny — read carefully |
| Open Science appendix | ~1 page, mandatory | Reviewers + AEC after acceptance — enforced, not just read |
| References + optional appendices | uncapped | Discretionary; assume skimmed at best |
The two named appendices sit between the body and the references — an ordering
unique enough that template mistakes are common. They are not overflow space: their
job is compliance content (see usenixsec-reproducibility and the ethics coverage
in usenixsec-topic-selection / usenixsec-experiments), and stuffing evaluation
material into them reads as a page-limit dodge.
What must stay inside the 13 pages
Anything a reviewer needs to judge the contribution:
- Threat model and assumptions — never appendix material at a security venue.
- The core mechanism or attack technique, end to end.
- Headline evaluation: main tables/figures, the adaptive-attacker experiment for defenses, the false-positive analysis for detection systems.
- Enough dataset description to assess validity (full construction detail can overflow to an optional appendix).
- Limitations. Hiding limitations in an appendix is a known reviewer irritant and reads as bad faith at a venue that prizes calibrated claims.
What earns its place in optional appendices
- Extended proofs or protocol-analysis detail supporting a body-level statement.
- Full per-target or per-CVE result tables where the body shows aggregates.
- Additional case studies repeating a body-demonstrated pattern.
- Survey instruments, codebooks, disclosure-email templates.
- Configuration minutiae an artifact user needs but a reviewer does not.
For each candidate block, apply the demotion test: if a reviewer never reads this, does any claim in the body lose its support? If yes, it stays in the body or the claim gets weakened. If no, demote it and leave a one-line pointer.
Overflow triage when the body runs long
Cutting to 13 pages is a routing exercise, in priority order:
- Compress prose, not evidence — security drafts habitually re-narrate tables.
- Merge figures that make one point; move third-and-later examples out.
- Demote per-item tables to an appendix, keeping the aggregate + the worst case.
- Only then consider dropping an experiment — and if it was load-bearing, the
paper may actually be two papers (see
usenixsec-topic-selection).
Never solve overflow with template surgery; the CFP forbids whitespace tampering and desk-level format checks are mechanical.
% Correct skeleton ('26 geometry) — verify against the current template
\end{document-body} % ≤ 13 pages ends here
\section*{Ethical Considerations} % mandatory, ≤ ~1 page
...
\section*{Open Science} % mandatory, ≤ ~1 page
...
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{refs} % uncapped
\appendix
\section{Extended Results} % optional, uncapped, no reading guarantee
\section{Survey Instrument}
External material: the artifact is the real supplement
Code, data, VM images, and long-form documentation live at the Open Science locations, not in the PDF. Two placement rules connect the tiers:
- The PDF should contain everything needed to evaluate the paper; the artifact contains everything needed to redo it. Reviewers are not obliged to open artifact links during review, so no reviewing-critical fact may exist only there.
- Anonymization at submission applies to all tiers at once: optional appendices and artifact READMEs leak identity exactly as effectively as page 1 does.
Reverify each cycle
- Page caps and the mandatory-appendix allowances in the current CFP ('27 待核实).
- Appendix ordering relative to references (this changed style between recent cycles at peer venues; don't assume).
- Whether any separate supplemental upload channel has been introduced.
Output format
[Geometry] body pages / named appendices present in order / optional appendix count
[Demotion audit] items moved out + demotion-test result for each
[Body integrity] claims fully supported inside 13 pages: yes / gaps
[External] artifact-only material list — nothing reviewing-critical: confirmed