thedixitjain 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-processfor how the REC uses it). - SoK papers have the
SoK:title prefix and the SoK checkbox — one without the other misroutes reviewing.
Format gate
| Rule (2027 CFP, checked 2026-07-08) | Enforcement |
|---|---|
| ≤ 13 pages of body text | Over-length ⇒ rejected without review |
| ≤ 5 further pages, references + appendices only | Same |
| Hard ceiling 18 pages total | Same |
| Everything past page 13 clearly marked as appendix | Reviewer-visible violation |
| IEEE "compsoc" conference-proceedings LaTeX template | Tampering ⇒ desk-level flag |
| Anonymized submission | Identity leak ⇒ desk reject |
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
- Freeze the threat model and claims; no new results after this point.
- Run the anonymization sweep above on the PDF and any linked artifact.
- Verify page arithmetic: body ends on or before p.13, total ≤ 18, appendix pages labeled.
- Complete registration: authors, ORCIDs, conflicts, abstract, Ethics Considerations, SoK checkbox if applicable.
- Upload the paper; re-download from HotCRP and re-check the rendered PDF — font substitution has broken compsoc submissions before.
- Confirm the HotCRP abstract matches the PDF abstract.
Desk-reject triage
| Trigger | Repairable after deadline? |
|---|---|
| Missing/mismatched ORCID for any author | No — desk reject |
| Body text past page 13 or total > 18 | No — rejected without review |
| Author list change after registration | No — frozen |
| Identity leak in PDF or artifact | No |
| Weak Ethics Considerations entry | No new entry; damage lands in review/REC |
| Thin adaptive-attack evaluation | Review-stage damage; fix before, not after |
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>
Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → IEEE-SP-Skills/skills/ieeesp-submission/SKILL.md