USENIX Security '21 Call for Papers

Symposium Overview

The USENIX Security Symposium brings together researchers, practitioners, system administrators, system programmers, and others interested in the latest advances in the security and privacy of computer systems and networks. The 30th USENIX Security Symposium will be held as a virtual event on August 11–13, 2021.

Important: The USENIX Security Symposium moved to multiple submission deadlines in 2019 and included changes to the review process and submission policies. Detailed information is available at USENIX Security Publication Model Changes.

All researchers are encouraged to submit papers covering novel and scientifically significant practical works in computer security. The Symposium will span three days with a technical program including refereed papers, invited talks, posters, panel discussions, and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions.

Important Dates

Summer Deadline

  • Refereed paper submissions due: Thursday, June 11, 2020, 11:59 pm AoE Thursday, June 18, 2020, 11:59 pm AoE (Extended)
  • Early reject notification: July 24, 2020
  • Rebuttal Period: August 31–September 2, 2020
  • Notification to authors: September 11, 2020
  • Final paper files due: October 13, 2020
  • Video presentations due: Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Fall Deadline

  • Refereed paper submissions due: Thursday, October 15, 2020, 11:59 pm AoE
  • Early reject notification: November 20, 2020
  • Rebuttal Period: January 11–13, 2021
  • Notification to authors: January 21, 2021
  • Final paper files due: February 22, 2021
  • Video presentations due: Thursday, May 20, 2021

Winter Deadline

  • Refereed paper submissions due: Thursday, February 4, 2021, 11:59 pm AoE
  • Early reject notification: March 12, 2021
  • Rebuttal Period: April 19–21, 2021
  • Notification to authors: April 30, 2021
  • Final paper files due: June 2, 2021
  • Video presentations due: Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Symposium Organizers

Program Co-Chairs

Michael Bailey, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Rachel Greenstadt, New York University

Program Committee

Yousra Aafer, University of Waterloo
Ruba Abu-Salma, University College London and Inria
Gunes Acar, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
David Adrian, Censys
Sadia Afroz, International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), University of California, Berkeley, and Avast
Devdatta Akhawe, Figma
Ardalan Amiri Sani, University of California, Irvine
Benjamin Andow, Google
Sebastian Angel, University of Pennsylvania
Pauline Anthonysamy, Google
Manos Antonakakis, Georgia Institute of Technology
Daniele Antonioli, EPFL
Elias Athanasopoulos, University of Cyprus
Mohammad Atiqul Islam, The University of Texas at Arlington
David Barrera, Carleton University
Jethro G. Beekman, Fortanix
Matthew Bernhard, University of Michigan
Antonio Bianchi, Purdue University
Battista Biggio, University of Cagliari, Italy
Leyla Bilge, NortonLifeLock Research Group
Vincent Bindschaedler, University of Florida
Tamara Bonaci, Northeastern University
Joseph C Bonneau, New York University
Sven Bugiel, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Nathan Burow, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Kevin Butler, University of Florida
Joseph Calandrino, Federal Trade Commission
Aylin Caliskan, George Washington University
Stefano Calzavara, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
Yinzhi Cao, Johns Hopkins University
Alvaro A. Cardenas, University of California, Santa Cruz
Michael Carl Tschantz, International Computer Science Institute (ICSI)
Nicholas Carlini, Google
Lorenzo Cavallaro, King's College London
Z. Berkay Celik, Purdue University
Sang Kil Cha, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
Rahul Chatterjee, University of Wisconsin—Madison
Sze Yiu Chau, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Kai Chen, IIE, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Qi Alfred Chen, University of California, Irvine
Marshini Chetty, University of Chicago
Sherman S. M. Chow, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Omar Haider Chowdhury, The University of Iowa
Mihai Christodorescu, Visa Research
Erinn Clark, Google
Camille Cobb, Carnegie Mellon University
Shaanan Cohney, Princeton University and University of Melbourne
Andrea Continella, University of Twente
Scott Coull, FireEye
Cas Cremers, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Bruno Crispo, University of Trento
Michel Cukier, University of Maryland
George Danezis, University College London and Facebook Calibra
Anupam Das, North Carolina State University
Sanchari Das, Indiana University Bloomington
Sauvik Das, Georgia Institute of Technology
Nathan Dautenhahn, Rice University
Lucas Davi, University of Duisburg-Essen
Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project
Alexandra Dmitrienko, University of Wuerzburg
Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, New York University
Adam Doupé, Arizona State University
Zakir Durumeric, Stanford University
Manuel Egele, Boston University
Serge Egelman, International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), University of California, Berkeley, and AppCensus, Inc.
Thomas Eisenbarth, University of Lübeck
Mohamed Elsabagh, Kryptowire
Pardis Emami-Naeini, University of Washington
William Enck, North Carolina State University
Roya Ensafi, University of Michigan
Sascha Fahl, Leibniz University Hannover
Giulia Fanti, Carnegie Mellon University
Kassem Fawaz, University of Wisconsin—Madison
Nick Feamster, University of Chicago
Ariel J. Feldman, Google
Wu-chang Feng, Portland State University
Earlence Fernandes, University of Wisconsin—Madison
Tobias Fiebig, TU Delft
David Fifield, Unaffiliated
Simone Fischer-Hubner, Karlstad University
Christopher Wardlaw Fletcher, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Michael Franz, University of California, Irvine
Yanick Fratantonio, Cisco Talos
Matt Fredrikson, Carnegie Mellon University
David Freeman, Facebook Inc.
Patrick Gage Kelley, Google
Flavio Garcia, University of Birmingham, UK
Siddharth Garg, New York University
Christina Garman, Purdue University
Carrie Gates, Bank of America
Gennie Gebhart, The Electronic Frontier Foundation
Daniel Genkin, University of Michigan
Arthur Gervais, Imperial College London
Irene Giacomelli, Protocol Labs
Yossi Gilad, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Ian Goldberg, University of Waterloo
Neil Gong, Duke University
Daniel Gruss, Graz University of Technology
Guofei Gu, Texas A&M University
J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan
Mike Hamburg, Rambus
Hamza Harkous, Google
Wajih Ul Hassan, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Marcella Hastings, University of Pennsylvania
Xiali (Sharon) Hei, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Nadia Heninger, University of California, San Diego
Ryan Henry, University of Calgary
Alejandro Hevia, University of Chile
Matthew Hicks, Virginia Tech
Avesta Hojjati, Digicert Inc
Thorsten Holz, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Nicholas Hopper, University of Minnesota
Amir Houmansadr, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Danny Yuxing Huang, New York University
Mathias Humbert, Cyber-Defence Campus, armasuisse S+T
Sotiris Ioannidis, Technical University of Crete
Cynthia Irvine, Naval Postgraduate School
Suman Jana, Columbia University
Yeongjin Jang, Oregon State University
Rob Jansen, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Ramya Jayaram Masti, Intel Corporation
Yuseok Jeon, UNIST (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology)
Somesh Jha, University of Wisconsin—Madison
Anthony D Joseph, University of California, Berkeley
Brent ByungHoon Kang, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
Chris Kanich, University of Illinois at Chicago
Apu Kapadia, Indiana University Bloomington
Alexandros Kapravelos, North Carolina State University
Gabriel Kaptchuk, Boston University
Aniket Kate, Purdue University
Vasileios Kemerlis, Brown University
Florian Kerschbaum, University of Waterloo
Yongdae Kim, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
Sam King, University of California, Davis
Engin Kirda, Northeastern University
Tadayoshi Kohno, University of Washington
Kevin T. Kornegay, Morgan State University
Katharina Krombholz, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Christopher Kruegel, University of California, Santa Barbara
Deepak Kumar, Stanford University
Anil Kurmus, IBM Research - Zurich
Negar Kyavash, EPFL
Andrea Lanzi, University of Milan
Pierre Laperdrix, University of Lille, CNRS, and Inria
Pavel Laskov, University of Liechtenstein
Mathias Lécuyer, Microsoft Research
Byoungyoung Lee, Seoul National University
Sangho Lee, Microsoft Research
Wenke Lee, Georgia Institute of Technology
Anja Lehmann, Hasso-Plattner-Institute, University of Potsdam
Corrado Leita, VMWare
Tancrède Lepoint, Google
Dave Levin, University of Maryland
Frank Li, Georgia Institute of Technology
Qi Li, Tsinghua University
David Lie, University of Toronto
Zhiqiang Lin, The Ohio State University
Fangfei Liu, Intel Corporation
Mingyan Liu, University of Michigan
Kangjie Lu, University of Minnesota
Wouter Lueks, EPFL
Shiqing Ma, Rutgers University
Mateo Maffei, Technische Universität Wien
Stefan Mangard, Graz University of Technology
Michail Maniatakos, New York University Abu Dhabi
Shri Mare, Western Washington University
Ivan Martinovic, University of Oxford
Clémentine Maurice, CNRS, IRISA
Michelle Mazurek, University of Maryland
Stephen McCamant, University of Minnesota
Jon McCune, Google
Patrick McDaniel, The Pennsylvania State University
Susan E. McGregor, Columbia University
Nele Mentens, Leiden University and KU Leuven
Andrew Miller, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Brad Miller, Google
Jiang Ming, The University of Texas at Arlington
Esfandiar Mohammadi, University of Lübeck
Veelasha Moonsamy, Radboud University and Ruhr-University Bochum
Tyler Moore, The University of Tulsa
Takao Murakami, AIST
Toby Murray, University of Melbourne
Adwait Nadkarni, College of William & Mary
Nick Nikiforakis, Stony Brook University
Shirin Nilizadeh, The University of Texas at Arlington
Rishab Nithyanand, The University of Iowa
Guevara Noubir, Northeastern University
Hamed Okhravi, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Cristina Onete, University of Limoges, XLIM, and CNRS 7252
Yossi Oren, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Rebekah Overdorf, EPFL
Chris Palmer, Google
Dimitrios Papadopoulos, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Nicholas Papernot, University of Toronto and Vector Institute
Aleatha Parker-Wood, Unaffiliated
Mathias Payer, EPFL
Paul Pearce, Georgia Institute of Technology and International Computer Science Institute (ICSI)
Giancarlo Pellegrino, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Roberto Perdisci, University of Georgia
Radia Perlman, Dell Technologies
Peter A. H. Peterson, University of Minnesota Duluth
Zachary Peterson, California Polytechnic State University
Van-Thuan Pham, University of Melbourne
Stjepan Picek, TU Delft
Jason Polakis, University of Illinois at Chicago
Christina Pöpper, New York University Abu Dhabi
Niels Provos, Stripe
Zhiyun Qian, University of California, Riverside
Syed Rafiul Hussain, The Pennsylvania State University
Amir Rahmati, Stony Brook University
Sara Rampazzi, University of Michigan and University of Florida
Damith Ranasinghe, The University of Adelaide
Aanjhan Ranghanathan, Northeastern University
Bradley Reaves, North Carolina State University
Elissa M. Redmiles, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
Konrad Rieck, Technische Universität Braunschweig
Thomas Ristenpart, Cornell Tech
William Robertson, Northeastern University
Eyal Ronen, Tel Aviv University
Stefanie Roos, Delft University of Technology
Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Technische Universität Darmstadt
Merve Sahin, SAP Security Research
Brendan Saltaformaggio, Georgia Institute of Technology
Nolen Scaife, University of Colorado Boulder
Bruce Schneier, Harvard Kennedy School
Michael Schwarz, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Jörg Schwenk, Ruhr University Bochum
Kent Seamons, Brigham Young University
Vyas Sekar, Carnegie Mellon University
Wendy Seltzer, W3C and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Srinath Setty, Microsoft Research
Fatemeh Shirazi, Web3 Foundation
Haya Shulman, Fraunhofer SIT
Juraj Somorovsky, Paderborn University
Sooel Son, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
Chengyu Song, University of California, Riverside
Drew Springall, Auburn University
Angelos Stavrou, Virginia Tech
Deian Stefan, University of California, San Diego
Ben Stock, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Gianluca Stringhini, Boston University
Cynthia Sturton, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Nick Sullivan, Cloudflare
Yixin Sun, University of Virginia
Paul Syverson, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Patrick Tague, Carnegie Mellon University
Qiang Tang, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Juan Tapiador, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Kurt Thomas, Google
Dave (Jing) Tian, Purdue University
Yuan Tian, University of Virginia
Laura Tinnel, SRI International
Nils Ole Tippenhauer, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Jacob Torrey, DARPA
Florian Tramèr, Stanford University
Patrick Traynor, University of Florida
Blase Ur, University of Chicago
Anjo Vahldiek-Oberwagner, Intel Labs
Mayank Varia, Boston University
Ingrid Verbauwhede, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Bimal Viswanath, Virginia Tech
Daniel Votipka, Tufts University
David Wagner, University of California, Berkeley
Ryan Wails, Georgetown University and U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Gang Wang, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Ruoyu Wang, Arizona State University
Ting Wang, The Pennsylvania State University
Byron Williams, University of Florida
Christian Wressnegger, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Matthew Wright, Rochester Institute of Technology
Eric Wustrow, University of Colorado Boulder
Xusheng Xiao, Case Western Reserve University
Xinyu Xing, The Pennsylvania State University
Dongyan Xu, Purdue University
Wenyuan Xu, Zhejiang University
Jason Minhui Xue, The University of Adelaide
Yuval Yarom, The University of Adelaide and Data61
Tuba Yavuz, University of Florida
Heng Yin, University of California, Riverside
Daniel Zappala, Brigham Young University
Qiang Zeng, University of South Carolina
Fengwei Zhang, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech)
Xiangyu Zhang, Purdue University
Yang Zhang, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Mary Ellen Zurko, MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Invited Talks Chair

Carrie Gates, Bank of America

Invited Talks Committee

Jeremy Epstein, National Science Foundation
Deb Frincke, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Giancarlo Pellegrino, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Test of Time Awards Committee

Dan Boneh, Stanford University
Lorrie Faith Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
Nick Feamster, University of Chicago
Kevin Fu, University of Michigan
Fabian Monrose, The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Paul van Oorschot, Carleton University
David Wagner, University of California, Berkeley
Dan Wallach, Rice University
Wenyuan Xu, Zhejiang University

Steering Committee

Matt Blaze, Georgetown University
Dan Boneh, Stanford University
Srdjan Capkun, ETH Zurich
William Enck, North Carolina State University
Kevin Fu, University of Michigan
Casey Henderson, USENIX Association
Nadia Heninger, University of California, San Diego
Thorsten Holz, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Engin Kirda, Northeastern University
Tadayoshi Kohno, University of Washington
Thomas Ristenpart, Cornell Tech
Franziska Roesner, University of Washington
Patrick Traynor, University of Florida
David Wagner, University of California, Berkeley

Symposium Topics

Refereed paper submissions are solicited in all areas relating to systems research in security and privacy, including but not limited to:

  • System security
    • Operating systems security
    • Web security
    • Mobile systems security
    • Distributed systems security
    • Cloud computing security
  • Network security
    • Intrusion and anomaly detection and prevention
    • Network infrastructure security
    • Denial-of-service attacks and countermeasures
    • Wireless security
  • Security analysis
    • Malware analysis
    • Analysis of network and security protocols
    • Attacks with novel insights, techniques, or results
    • Forensics and diagnostics for security
    • Automated security analysis of hardware designs and implementation
    • Automated security analysis of source code and binaries
    • Machine learning in a secure systems context
    • Program analysis
  • Data-driven security and measurement studies
    • Measurements of fraud, malware, spam
    • Measurements of human behavior and security
  • Privacy-enhancing technologies and anonymity
  • Usable security and privacy
  • Language-based security
  • Hardware security
    • Secure computer architectures
    • Embedded systems security
    • Methods for detection of malicious or counterfeit hardware
    • Side channels
  • Research on surveillance and censorship
  • Social issues and security
    • Research on computer security law and policy
    • Ethics of computer security research
    • Research on security education and training
    • Information manipulation
    • Online abuse and harassment
  • Applications of cryptography
    • Analysis of deployed cryptography and cryptographic protocols
    • Cryptographic implementation analysis
    • New cryptographic protocols with real-world applications

This topic list is not meant to be exhaustive; USENIX Security is interested in all aspects of computing systems security and privacy. Papers without a clear application to security or privacy of computing systems, however, will be considered out of scope and may be rejected without full review.

Refereed Papers

Papers that have been formally reviewed and accepted will be presented during the Symposium and published in the Symposium Proceedings. By submitting a paper, you agree that at least one of the authors will attend the conference to present it. Alternative arrangements will be made if global health concerns persist. If the conference registration fee will pose a hardship for the presenter of the accepted paper, please contact conference@usenix.org.

A major mission of the USENIX Association is to provide for the creation and dissemination of new knowledge. In keeping with this and as part of USENIX’s open access policy, the Proceedings will be available online for registered attendees before the Symposium and for everyone starting on the opening day of the technical sessions. USENIX also allows authors to retain ownership of the copyright in their works, requesting only that USENIX be granted the right to be the first publisher of that work. See our sample consent form for the complete terms of publication.

Go to Paper Submission Policies and Instructions page for more information.

Artifact Evaluation

View the Call for Artifacts.

Invited Talks and Panel Discussions

Invited talks and panel discussions will be held in parallel with the refereed paper sessions. Please submit topic suggestions and talk and panel proposals via email to sec21it@usenix.org by Thursday, February 4, 2021.

Go to Paper Submission Policies and Instructions