Call for Papers
Submissions must not substantially duplicate work that any of the authors has published in a journal or a conference/workshop with proceedings, or has submitted/is planning to submit before the author notification deadline to a journal or other conferences/workshops that have proceedings. Accepted submissions may not appear in any other conference or workshop that has proceedings. IACR reserves the right to share information about submissions with other program committees and editorial boards to detect parallel submissions and the IACR policy on irregular submissions will be strictly enforced.
The submission must be written in English and be anonymous, with no author names, affiliations, ac- knowledgments, or obvious references. It should begin with a title, a short abstract, and a list of keywords. The introduction should summarize the contributions of the paper at a level appropriate for a non-specialist reader. Submissions should be typeset in the iacrtrans LaTeX class, available at github. The class documentation includes examples and instructions to easily convert a paper written with the llncs class.
The submission must be submitted electronically in PDF format. A detailed description of the electronic submission procedure is available here. By submitting a work to one of the four issues, the authors will be invited to present their paper at the FSE 2026 conference if the submission is accepted. In order to improve the quality of the review process, authors will be given the opportunity to enter a rebuttal between the indicated dates, after receiving the reviews.
The page limit for regular papers is 20 pages excluding bibliography. Authors are encouraged to include supplementary material that can assist reviewers in verifying the validity of the results at the end of the paper. Supplementary material that does not require extra reviewing effort (such as test values, source code, or charts) will be published with the paper, but are not included in the page count. However, material that requires careful reviewing (such as proofs of the main theorems) will be included in the page count, even if they are written as appendices.
If authors believe that more details are essential to substantiate the claims of their paper or to provide proofs, they can submit a longer paper (with no page limit); this should be indicated by checking the box “Long Paper” in the submission server (and no more by appending the phrase “(Long Paper)” to the title). For long papers of up to 40 pages, the decision may be deferred to the next round at the discretion of the editors-in-chief (and to the next FSE if submitted in November). For papers longer than 40 pages, the first round of review may be dedicated only to evaluating whether the length of the papers is justified by the scientific contribution. Moreover, the decision may be deferred by one or more rounds at the discretion of the editors-in-chief.
Submissions not meeting these guidelines risk rejection without consideration of their merits.
Publication Model
From 2017, FSE has moved to an open-access journal/conference hybrid model. Submitted articles undergo a journal-style reviewing process. Accepted papers are published in Diamond Open Access (free availability from day one) by the Ruhr University Bochum in an issue of the journal IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology.
The yearly FSE event will consist of presentations of articles accepted to the IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology journal, as well as invited talks and potentially social activities. This model has been established as a way to improve reviewing and publication quality while retaining the highly successful community event FSE. For any further information, please view the FAQ page: https://tosc.iacr.org/FAQ.
For FSE 2026, authors can submit papers to the IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology four times, 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 be provided with “minor revision”decisions, in which case the paper is conditionally accepted and an assigned shepherd will verify if the changes are applied, “major revision” decisions, in which case authors are provided with a list of requested changes that are likely to result in the paper being accepted, or “reject and resubmit” decisions when the reviewers see some potential in the paper, but there are significant issues to address before the paper can be properly evaluated.
In case of a “major revision” decision, the authors are invited to revise and resubmit their article to one of the following two submission deadlines (respectively one month and four months after the notification), together with a statement explaining how the reviews have been addressed. We endeavor to assign the same reviewers to revised versions. Major revision papers will be considered to be under review during the four months window after the notification; authors must formally withdraw their paper if they wish to submit it to another journal or a conference/workshop with proceedings. If the paper is resubmitted after more than four months, it will be treated as a new submission.
In case of a “reject and resubmit” decision, the authors can resubmit their article, but must wait at least for the second next submission deadline (four months after the notification), because the paper requires significant editorial or technical changes. These papers are not considered under review, and the revision may receive the same reviewers or different reviewers. Rejected papers can only be resubmitted after significantly improving the results.
Authors of rejected papers must wait at least for the third submission deadline (seven months after the notification) before resubmitting.
Papers accepted for publication before the end of January 2026 will be invited for presentation at that year’s conference. Note that papers submitted in November can be deferred to the next year’s conference in case of “major revision”. Presentation of accepted papers is only possible in person by authors physically attending FSE 2026. Presentation of accepted papers is highly encouraged. If no presentation is given in person, a long version of the talk has to be recorded before the conference and a short version (recorded or live) can optionally be shown at the conference.
Conflicts of Interest
Authors, program committee members, and reviewers must follow the new IACR Policy on Conflicts of Interest, available here.
In particular, the authors of each submission are asked during the submission process to identify all members of the Program Committee who have an automatic conflict of interest (COI) with the submission. A reviewer and an author have an automatic COI if:
- one was the thesis advisor/supervisor of the other
- or if they have shared an institutional affiliation within the last two years
- or if they have published two or more joint authored works within the last three years
- or if they are in the same family
Further COIs are possible, see the IACR Policy on Conflicts of Interest for details.
It is the responsibility of all authors to ensure correct reporting of COI information. Submissions with incorrect or incomplete COI information may be rejected without consideration of their merits.
