Call for Papers

17th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2017)
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
July 18 – 21, 2017
General information: https://petsymposium.org/
Submission server: https://submit.petsymposium.org/2017.2/

The annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) brings together privacy experts from around the world to present and discuss recent advances and new perspectives on research in privacy technologies. The 17th PETS event will be organised by the University of Minnesota and held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, July 18 – 21, 2017.

Papers undergo a journal-style reviewing process and accepted papers are published in the journal Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs). Submitted papers should present novel practical and/or theoretical research into the design, analysis, experimentation, or fielding of privacy-enhancing technologies. While PETS/PoPETs has traditionally been home to research on anonymity systems and privacy-oriented cryptography, we strongly encourage submissions on a number of both well-established and emerging privacy-related topics, for which examples are provided below.

PoPETs, a scholarly, open access journal for timely research papers on privacy, has been established as a way to improve reviewing and publication quality while retaining the highly successful PETS community event. PoPETs is published by De Gruyter Open, the world's second largest publisher of open access academic content, and part of the De Gruyter group, which has over 260 years of publishing history. PoPETs does not have article processing charges (APCs) or article submission charges.

Authors can submit papers to PoPETs four times a year, every three months on a predictable schedule. Authors are notified of the decisions about two months after submission. In addition to ‘accept’ and ‘reject’ decisions, papers may receive ‘major revision’ decisions, in which case authors are invited to revise and resubmit their article to one of the following two submission deadlines. We endeavor to assign the same reviewers to revised versions. Papers accepted for publication within or before the February deadline round will be presented at that year's symposium. Note that accepted papers must be presented at PETS.

PoPETs also solicits submissions for Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) papers. These are papers that critically review, evaluate, and contextualize work in areas for which a body of prior literature exists, and whose contribution lies in systematizing the existing knowledge in that area. To be suitable for publication, SoK articles must provide an added value beyond a literature review, such as novel insights, identification of research gaps, or challenges to commonly held assumptions. SoK papers will follow the same review process as other submissions, and will be published in PoPETs and presented at the PETS 2017 event.

Submit papers for PoPETs 2017, Issue 2 at https://submit.petsymposium.org/2017.2/. Please see the submission guidelines below, and view our FAQ for more information about the process.

Important Dates for PETS 2017

All deadlines are 23:59:59 American Samoa time (UTC-11)

Issue 1:
Paper submission deadline: May 31, 2016 (firm)
Rebuttal period: July 11 – 13, 2016
Author notification: August 1, 2016
Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers and minor revisions (if accepted by the shepherd): September 1, 2016

Issue 2:
Paper submission deadline: August 31, 2016 (firm)
Rebuttal period: October 10 – 12, 2016
Author notification: October 31, 2016
Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers and minor revisions (if accepted by the shepherd): November 30, 2016

Issue 3
Paper submission deadline: November 30, 2016 (firm)
Rebuttal period: January 9 – 11, 2017
Author notification: February 1, 2017
Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers and minor revisions (if accepted by the shepherd): March 1, 2017

Issue 4:
Paper submission deadline: February 28, 2017 (firm)
Rebuttal period: April 10 – 12, 2017
Author notification: May 1, 2017
Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers and minor revisions (if accepted by the shepherd): June 1, 2017

Papers which were submitted to a previous PoPETs deadline and invited to resubmit after major revisions can submit the revised (full) paper up to two weeks after the stated deadline. Such papers must however be registered with an abstract by the usual deadline. All other papers than these revised resubmissions must be submitted by the stated deadline, including papers submitted and rejected from a previous issue. Major revisions must be submitted in one of the two rounds following the decision; otherwise the paper will be treated as a new submission.

Suggested topics include but are not restricted to:

Behavioural targeting
Building and deploying privacy-enhancing systems
Crowdsourcing for privacy
Cryptographic tools for privacy
Data protection technologies
Differential privacy
Economics of privacy and game-theoretical approaches to privacy
Empirical studies of privacy in real-world systems
Forensics and privacy
Human factors, usability and user-centered design for PETs
Information leakage, data correlation and generic attacks to privacy
Interdisciplinary research connecting privacy to economics, law, ethnography, psychology, medicine, biotechnology
Location and mobility privacy
Measuring and quantifying privacy
Obfuscation-based privacy
Policy languages and tools for privacy
Privacy and human rights
Privacy and machine learning
Privacy in ubiquitous computing and mobile devices
Privacy in cloud and big-data applications
Privacy in social networks and microblogging systems
Privacy-enhanced access control, authentication, and identity management
Profiling and data mining
Reliability, robustness, and abuse prevention in privacy systems
Surveillance
Systems for anonymous communications and censorship resistance
Traffic analysis
Transparency enhancing tools
Web privacy

General Chair (gc17@petsymposium.org)
Nick Hopper, University of Minnesota

Program Chairs/Co-Editors-in-Chief (pets17-chairs@petsymposium.org)
Claudia Diaz, KU Leuven
Rachel Greenstadt, Drexel University
Damon McCoy, New York University

Program Committee/Editorial Board:
Gunes Acar, KU Leuven
Sadia Afroz, UC Berkeley
William Aiello, University of British Columbia
Mashael Al-Sabah, Qatar University
Hadi Asghari, TU Delft
N. Asokan, Aalto University
Adam Aviv, United States Naval Academy
Michael Backes, Saarland University
Solon Barocas, Princeton University
Lujo Bauer, Carnegie Mellon University
Matt Blaze, University of Pennsylvania
Ian Brown, Oxford Internet Institute
Sonja Buchegger, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Kevin Butler, University of Florida
Kelly Caine, Clemson University
Aylin Caliskan-Islam, Princeton University
Christopher Clifton, Purdue University
Jedidiah R. Crandall, University of New Mexico
George Danezis, University College London
Anupam Datta, Carnegie Mellon University
Emiliano De Cristofaro, University College London
Tamara Denning, University of Utah
Rinku Dewri, University of Denver
Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project
Orr Dunkelman, University of Haifa
Serge Egelman, University of California, Berkeley
Tariq Elahi, KU Leuven
Giulia Fanti, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
David Fifield, University of California, Berkeley
Simone Fischer-Hübner, Karlstad University
Bryan Ford, Yale University / EPFL
Vaibhav Garg, VISA
Ian Goldberg, University of Waterloo
Thomas Groß, Newcastle University
Jens Grossklags, Penn State
Seda Gurses, NYU / Princeton University
Marit Hansen, Independent Centre for Privacy Protection Schleswig-Holstein
Ryan Henry, Indiana University Bloomington
Raquel Hill, Indiana University Bloomington
Jaap-Henk Hoepman, Radboud University Nijmegen
Yan Huang, Indiana University Bloomington
Rob Jansen, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Aaron Johnson, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Apu Kapadia, Indiana University Bloomington
Jonathan Katz, University of Maryland
Aggelos Kiayias, University of Athens
Bart Knijnenburg, Clemson University
Markulf Kohlweiss, Microsoft Research
Yoshi Kohno, University of Washington
Albert Kwon, MIT
Susan Landau, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Peeter Laud, Cybernetica
Adam Lee, University of Pittsburgh
Boon Thau Loo, University of Pennsylvania
Marc Libertori, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Aleecia McDonald, Stanford University
Prateek Mittal, Princeton University
Payman Mohassel, Yahoo!/Calgary
Steven Murdoch, University College London
Steven Myers, Indiana University Bloomington
Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University
Muhammad Naveed, University of Southern California
Shirin Nilizadeh, UCSB
Guevara Noubir, Northeastern University
Vern Paxson, University of California, Berkeley
Adrian Perrig, ETHZ
Rob Reeder, Google
Thomas Roessler, Google
Keith Ross, New York University
Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Technische University Darmstadt
Reihaneh Safavi-Naini, University of Calgary
Hovav Schacham, UCSD
Stuart Schechter, Microsoft Research
Martin Schmiedeckre, SBA Research
Peter Schwabe, Radboud University Nijmegen
Mohamed Shehab, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Reza Shokri, ETH Zurich
Thomas Shrimpton, University of Florida
Jessica Staddon, NC State University
Thorsten Strufe, TU Dresden
Carmela Troncoso, IMDEA Software Institute
Michael Tschantz, University of California, Berkeley
Kami Vaniea, Indiana University
Eugene Vasserman, Kansas State University
Michael Waidner, Technische University Darmstadt
Tao Wang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Tara Whalen, Google
Philipp Winter, Princeton University
Joss Wright, Oxford Internet Institute

Publicity Chairs (publicity17@petsymposium.org)
Tariq Elahi, KU Leuven
Kat Hanna

Publications Chair (publication17@petsymposium.org)
Marc Juarez, KU Leuven

Submission Guidelines
Papers not following these instructions risk being rejected without consideration of their merits!

Submitted papers must be at most 15 pages excluding bibliography and appendices and 20 pages total in De Gruyter Open format (LaTeX template). PC members are not required to read the appendices, which should only be used to provide additional supporting information.

Unlike journals that publish extended versions of conference papers, PoPETs seeks to publish original, previously unpublished work. Submitted papers must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings. The paper should start with the title and an abstract. The introduction should give some background and summarize the contributions of the paper at a level appropriate for a non-specialist reader.

Anonymization of Submissions
All submitted papers will be judged based on their quality and relevance through double-blind reviewing, where the identities of the authors are withheld from the reviewers. As an author, you are required to make a good-faith effort to preserve the anonymity of your submission, while at the same time allowing the reader to fully grasp the context of related past work, including your own. It is recognized that, at times, information regarding the identities of authors may become public outside the submission process (e.g., if a pre-print is published as a technical report or on a pre-print server) – the PC will ignore this external information. Minimally, please take the following steps when preparing your submission:

Remove the names and affiliations of authors from the title page.
Remove acknowledgment of identifying names and funding sources.
Use care in referring to related work, particularly your own. Do not omit references to provide anonymity, as this leaves the reviewer unable to grasp the context. Instead, reference your past work in the third person, just as you would any other piece of related work by another author.

Security Proofs
Some papers require lengthy security proofs to support the technical validity of the contribution. These papers should indicate this in the body of the paper and include the proof in the appendix. The acceptance or rejection notification for these papers may be delayed to allow for the proof to be reviewed, meaning that the paper may appear in the issue following the one to which it was submitted. A paper submitted to the February deadline may or may not be reviewed in time for the paper to be presented at that year’s symposium. If this occurs the paper will be published in Issue 1 of the following year and presented at that year’s symposium.

Ethics
Papers describing experiments with users or user data (e.g., network traffic, passwords, social network information), should follow the basic principles of ethical research, e.g., beneficence (maximizing the benefits to an individual or to society while minimizing harm to the individual), minimal risk (appropriateness of the risk versus benefit ratio), voluntary consent, respect for privacy, and limited deception. Authors are encouraged to include a subsection on Ethical Principles if human subjects research is conducted, and such a discussion may be required if deemed necessary during the review process. This section should include a justification of the ethics of the work and information about whether the work was submitted to an external ethics panel such as an IRB. Research that is deemed to not have met adequate ethical standards may be rejected on those grounds. Authors are encouraged to contact PC chairs before submitting to clarify any doubts.

Copyright
Accepted papers will be published as an open access journal by De Gruyter Open, the world's second largest publisher of open access academic content, and part of the De Gruyter group, which has over 260 years of publishing history. Authors retain copyright of their work. Papers will be published under an open access policy using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

Best Student Paper Award
The Andreas Pfitzmann PETS 2017 Best Student Paper Award will be selected at PETS 2017. Papers written solely or primarily by a student who is presenting the work at PETS 2017 are eligible for the award.

Submission
Papers must be submitted via the PETS 2017 submission server. The URL for Issue 2 is: https://submit.petsymposium.org/2017.2/.

HotPETs
As with the last several years, part of the symposium will be devoted to HotPETs — the "hottest," most exciting research ideas still in a formative state. Further information will be published on the PETS 2017 website soon.