Call for Papers
25th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2025)
July 14–19, 2025
Washington, DC and Online
The annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) brings together experts from around the world to present and discuss recent advances and new perspectives on research in privacy technologies. The 25th PETS will be a hybrid event with a physical gathering held in Washington, DC, USA and a concurrent virtual event. Papers undergo a journal-style reviewing process, and accepted papers are published in the journal Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs). Authors of accepted papers are encouraged to attend and present at the physical event, where their presentations can be recorded for the virtual event and where they can participate directly in in-person research, technical, and social activities. However, in-person attendance is not required for publication in the proceedings.
PoPETs, a scholarly, open-access journal for research papers on privacy, provides high-quality reviewing and publication while also supporting the successful PETS community event. PoPETs is self-published and does not have article processing charges or article submission charges.
Authors can submit papers to PoPETs four times a year, every three months, and are notified of the decisions about two months after submission. Authors will receive a decision of accept, revise, or reject; those receiving revise will be invited to revise their article with the guidance of a revision editor according to a well-defined set of revision criteria and will have up to four months to attempt to complete the required revisions. Authors of rejected papers must skip a full issue prior to resubmission.
Submission GuidelinesThe submission guidelines contain important submission information for authors. Please note especially the instructions for anonymizing submissions, for ensuring ethical research, and for using AI in writing or editing the manuscript. Papers must be submitted via the PETS 2025 submission server. The submission URL is: https://submit.petsymposium.org/.
Important Dates for PETS 2025
All deadlines are 23:59:59 Anywhere on Earth (UTC-12)
Issue 1
Paper submission deadline: May 31, 2024 (firm)
Rebuttal period: July 16–19, 2024
Author notification: August 1, 2024
Revision deadline: September 1, 2024
Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers and accepted revisions: September 15, 2024
Issue 2
Paper submission deadline: August 31, 2024 (firm)
Rebuttal period: October 15–18, 2024
Author notification: November 1, 2024
Revision deadline: December 1, 2024
Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers and accepted revisions: December 15, 2024
Issue 3
Paper submission deadline: November 30, 2024 (firm)
Rebuttal period: January 14–17, 2025
Author notification: February 1, 2025
Revision deadline: March 1, 2025
Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers and accepted revisions: March 15, 2025
Issue 4
Paper submission deadline: February 28, 2025 (firm)
Rebuttal period: April 15–18, 2025
Author notification: May 1, 2025
Revision deadline: June 1, 2025
Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers and accepted revisions: June 15, 2025
Review Process (New for 2025)
Authors invited to revise their submissions will be provided with a set of revision criteria that must be satisfactorily completed before their paper can be accepted. Authors of such papers will not resubmit to the next issue, but will instead be assigned a revision editor who will guide the revision process by interactively reviewing new versions of the paper and providing feedback and guidance on the changes necessary for acceptance. Authors will be instructed to propose a revision schedule that is agreeable to the revision editor. Authors may complete the necessary changes as soon as is practical but no later than four months following the author notification deadline: revisions that are accepted by the revision editor within 1 month of the author notification will appear in that issue, while revisions that are accepted by the revision editor between 1-4 months of the author notification will appear in the following issue. Not all papers that receive a revise decision will be accepted: papers that do not adequately incorporate the required revisions by the following issue's revision deadline will be rejected. Please see the review process page for more information.
Resubmission of Rejected Papers (New for 2025)
Authors of rejected papers may consider resubmitting to a future issue of PoPETs, but must skip one full issue before resubmission. For example, papers that are rejected from Issue 1 may not be resubmitted until Issue 3 or later. This policy follows into future volumes as well. For example, papers that are rejected from Issue 3 of Volume 2025 may not be resubmitted until Issue 1 of Volume 2026. This policy enables authors ample time to substantially improve their papers and helps mitigate the overburdening of reviewers.
Scope (New for 2025)
Papers submitted to PETS/PoPETs should present novel practical and/or theoretical research into the requirements, design, analysis, experimentation, or fielding of privacy-enhancing technologies and the social, cultural, legal, or situational contexts in which they are used. PETS is also open to interdisciplinary research examining people’s and communities’ privacy needs, preferences, and expectations as long as it is clear how these findings can impact the design, development, or deployment of technology with privacy implications.
Note that a paper's relevance to privacy applications is crucial. PETS is open to topics from the wider area of security and privacy as long as it is clear how these serve to improve or understand privacy in technology (e.g., it includes a use case, evaluation on real data, integration with an application, etc.) in real systems. A paper that makes significant contributions in an area such as theoretical cryptography but fails to clearly tie its contributions to improving or understanding privacy in real systems is unlikely to be accepted. The chairs and the program committee, at their discretion, may reject papers based on scope
Clarification of expectations: This year we introduced a new requirement that submissions must contribute to real privacy applications that run in real systems. Consistent with this focus, we expect that submissions should not need to rely on proofs as a primary contribution and thus proofs would usually appear in the Appendix rather than in the main body, and a substantial portion of each submission would instead be focused on work that is more traditionally considered practical or applied work (e.g., real-world use cases, real-world measurements, evaluation on real-world data, application development, integration with a real-world application, system design and evaluation, etc.). This focus is necessary due to an increasing number of submissions that make primary contributions that are highly theoretical in nature (e.g., to theoretical cryptography and primitives or related areas) for which PoPETs is not well-equipped to review and provide high quality feedback.
Suggested topics include but are not restricted to:
- Anonymous communication and censorship resistance
- Blockchain privacy
- Building and deploying privacy-enhancing systems
- Cloud computing and privacy
- Compliance with privacy laws and regulations
- Cryptographic tools for privacy
- Data protection technologies
- Defining and quantifying privacy
- Differential privacy and private data analysis
- Economics and game-theoretical approaches to privacy
- Forensics and privacy
- Genomic and medical privacy
- Human factors, usability, and user-centered design of privacy technologies
- Information leakage, data correlation, and abstract attacks on privacy
- Interdisciplinary research connecting privacy to economics, law, psychology, etc.
- Internet of Things privacy
- Location privacy
- Machine learning and privacy
- Measurement of privacy in real-world systems
- Mobile devices and privacy
- Policy languages and tools for privacy
- Profiling and data mining
- Social network privacy
- Surveillance
- Traffic analysis
- Transparency, fairness, robustness, and abuse in privacy systems
- Web privacy
We also solicit Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) papers on any of these topics: papers putting together existing knowledge under some common light (adversary model, requirements, functionality offered, etc.), providing novel insights, identifying research gaps or challenges to commonly held assumptions, etc. Survey papers, without such contributions, are not suitable. SoK submissions should include "SoK:" in their title and check the corresponding option in the submission form.
- General Chair (gc25@petsymposium.org)
- Adam Aviv, George Washington University
- Program Chairs/Co-Editors-in-Chief (pets25-chairs@petsymposium.org)
- Rob Jansen, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
- Zubair Shafiq, University of California, Davis
- Vice Program Chairs/Associate Editors-in-Chief
- Gunes Acar, Radboud University
- Diogo Barradas, University of Waterloo
- Devashish Gosain, BITS Pilani
- Katharina Kohls, Ruhr University Bochum
- Pierre Laperdrix, Inria
- Athina Markopoulou, University of California, Irvine
- Rishab Nithyanand, University of Iowa
- Rebekah Overdorf, University of Lausanne
- Tobias Pulls, Karlstad University
- Paul Syverson, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
- Program Committee/Editorial Board:
- Ruba Abu-Salma, King's College London
- Omer Akgul, Carnegie Mellon University
- Eman Alashwali, KAU, KAUST, and CMU
- Ghada Almashaqbeh, University of Connecticut
- Mário Alvim, UFMG
- Héber H. Arcolezi, Inria
- Frederik Armknecht, University of Mannheim
- Hassan Asghar, Macquarie University
- Erman Ayday, Case Western Reserve University
- Sangwook Bae, Cape
- Zinaida Benenson, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
- Pascal Berrang, University of Birmingham
- Gergely Biczok, CrySyS Lab, Budapest Univ. of Technology and Economics
- Nataliia Bielova, Inria
- Igor Bilogrevic, Google
- Eleanor Birrell, Pomona College
- Cecylia Bocovich, The Tor Project
- Hannah (Hannaneh) B. Pasandi (Barahouei Pasandi), University of California - Berkeley
- Joe Calandrino
- Niklas Carlsson, Linköping University
- Sofia Celi, Brave
- Varun Chandrasekaran, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Panagiotis Chatzigiannis, Visa Research
- Yimin (Ian) Chen, University of Massachusetts Lowell
- Min Chen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- Sherman S. M. Chow, Chinese University of Hong Kong
- Francesco Ciclosi, University of Trento
- Shaanan Cohney, University of Melbourne
- Tianshuo Cong, Tsinghua University
- Kovila Coopamootoo, King's College London
- Jean-François Couchot, Univ. Bourgogne Franche-Comté
- Scott Coull, Google
- Rob Cunningham, University of Pittsburgh
- Ha Dao, MPI-INF
- Anupam Das, North Carolina State University
- Debajyoti Das, KU Leuven
- Edwin Dauber, Widener University
- Alex Davidson, NOVA LINCS, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa
- Alexandre Debant, Inria Nancy, France
- Martin Degeling, Independent Reseacher
- Soteris Demetriou, Imperial College London
- Nurullah Demir, Institute for Internet Security
- Damien Desfontaines, Tumult Labs
- Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project
- Ye Dong, Singapore University of Technology and Design
- Nir Drucker, IBM Research - Israel
- Minxin Du, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
- Markus Duermuth, Leibniz University Hannover
- Christoph Egger, Chalmers University of Technology
- Tariq Elahi, University of Edinburgh
- Roya Ensafi, CSE, university of Michigan
- Saba Eskandarian, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, EPFL
- Alvaro Feal, Cisco ThousandEyes
- Natasha Fernandes, Macquarie University, Australia
- Bryan Ford, EPFL
- Imane FOUAD, Inria/Univ of Lille
- Kevin Gallagher, NOVA LINCS, NOVA School of Science and Technology
- Julien Gamba, Cisco ThousandEyes
- Alexander Gamero-Garrido, UC Davis
- Peng Gao, Virginia Tech
- Simson Garfinkel, BasisTech, LLC & Harvard University
- Christina Garman, Purdue University
- Paolo Gasti, New York Institute of Technology
- Sepideh Ghanavati, University of Maine
- Zahra Ghodsi, Purdue University
- Prosanta Gope, University of Sheffield
- Rachel Greenstadt, New York University
- Adam Groce, Reed College
- Matteo Grosse-Kampmann, Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences and AWARE7 GmbH
- Thomas Gross, Newcastle University, United Kingdom
- Johanna Gunawan, Maastricht University
- Andreas Haeberlen, University of Pennsylvania / Roblox
- Syed Mahbub Hafiz, LG Electronics USA, Inc.
- Florian Hahn, University of Twente
- Lucjan Hanzlik, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- Jamie Hayes, Google Deepmind
- Ryan Henry, University of Calgary
- Stephen Herwig, William & Mary
- Weijia He, University of Southampton
- Nguyen Phong Hoang, University of British Columbia
- Thang Hoang, Virginia Tech
- Sanghyun Hong, Oregon State University
- Nick Hopper, University of Minnesota
- Murtuza Jadliwala, The University of Texas at San Antonio
- Limin Jia, Carnegie Mellon University
- Aaron Johnson, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
- Tushar Jois, City College of New York
- Marc Juarez, University of Edinburgh
- Nesrine Kaaniche, Institut Polytechnique de Paris
- Bailey Kacsmar, University of Alberta
- Stefan Katzenbeisser, University of Passau, Germany
- Megha Khosla, TU Delft
- Nadim Kobeissi, Symbolic Software
- Konrad Kollnig, Law & Tech Lab, Maastricht University
- Dhruv Kuchhal, Amazon, Inc.
- Piyush Kumar, University of Michigan
- Jaewoo Lee, University of Georgia
- Hieu Le, University of Michigan
- Duc Le, Visa Research
- Kaitai Liang, TU Delft
- Zheng Li, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- Kangjie Lu, University of Minnesota
- NING LUO, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Nathan Malkin, New Jersey Institute of Technology
- Sunil Manandhar, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
- Shrirang Mare, Western Washington University
- Rahat Masood, University of New South Wales (UNSW)
- Fabio Massacci, Univ. of Trento/Vrije Univ. Amsterdam
- Travis Mayberry, US Naval Academy
- Shagufta Mehnaz, Penn State University
- Maryam Mehrnezhad, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
- Sebastian Meiser, Universität of Lübeck
- David Mestel, Maastricht University
- Antonis Michalas, Tampere University
- Prateek Mittal, Princeton University
- Meisam Mohammady, Iowa State University
- Victor Morel, Chalmers University of Technology
- Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, IMDEA Software Institute
- Johannes Mueller, CNRS/LORIA Nancy
- Steven Murdoch, University College London
- Adwait Nadkarni, William & Mary
- Milad Nasr, Google Deepmind
- Joseph Near, University of Vermont
- Boel Nelson, Uppsala University; Aarhus University
- Nam Ngo, Privacy & Scaling Explorations, Ethereum Foundation
- Benjamin Nguyen, INSA Centre Val de Loire
- Shirin Nilizadeh, The University of Texas at Arlington
- Simon Oya, The University of British Columbia
- Catuscia Palamidessi, Inria
- Nisha Panwar, Augusta University
- Prajwal Panzade, Old Dominion University
- Panagiotis Papadopoulos, iProov Limited
- Jeongeun Park, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
- Dario Pasquini, George Mason University
- Christopher Patton, Cloudflare
- Sai Teja Peddinti, Google
- Balazs Pejo, CrySyS Lab, BME
- Amogh Pradeep, CrowdStrike
- Bart Preneel, KU Leuven
- Haotong Qin, ETH Zurich
- Lucy Qin, Georgetown University
- Ananth Raghunathan, Meta Inc.
- Sazzadur Rahaman, University of Arizona
- Thilina Ranbaduge, Data61, CSIRO
- Joel Reardon, University of Calgary and AppCensus, Inc
- Alfredo Rial, Nym Technologies
- Vera Rimmer, KU Leuven
- Luc Rocher, University of Oxford
- Florentin Rochet, UNamur
- Andy Rupp, University of Luxembourg and KASTEL SRL
- Kavous Salehzadeh Niksirat, EPFL
- Sajin Sasy, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- Theodor Schnitzler, Maastricht University
- Dominique Schroeder, TU Wien
- Gambs Sébastien, Université du Québec à Montréal
- Wendy Seltzer, Tucows
- Siamak Shahandashti, University of York, UK
- Mahmood Sharif, Tel Aviv University
- Supreeth Shastri, University of Iowa
- Yan Shvartzshnaider, York University
- Sandra Siby, New York University Abu Dhabi
- Tjerand Silde, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
- Lucy Simko, Barnard College
- Sachin Kumar Singh, University of Utah
- Georgios Smaragdakis, Delft University of Technology
- Xiangfu Song, National University of Singapore
- Thorsten Strufe, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
- Wei Sun, Wichita State University
- Ruoxi Sun, CSIRO's Data61
- Yixin Sun, University of Virginia
- Ajith Suresh, Technology Innovation Institute (TII), Abu Dhabi
- Nina Taft, Google
- Rajat Tandon, Juniper Networks Inc.
- Zahra Tarkhani, Microsoft
- Jan Tolsdorf, The George Washington University
- Carmela Troncoso, EPFL
- Hikaru Tsuchida, Saitama Institute of Technology
- Anselme Tueno, SAP
- Fatih Turkmen, University of Groningen
- Tobias Urban, Institute for Internet Security; Westphalian University of Applied Sciences
- Christine Utz, Radboud University
- Tavish Vaidya, Google
- Luke Valenta, Cloudflare, Inc.
- Tom Van Goethem, KU Leuven / Google
- Eugene Vasserman, Kansas State University
- Ryan Wails, Georgetown University & US Naval Research Laboratory
- Coby Wang, Visa Research
- Di Wang, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
- Haoyu Wang, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
- Zachary Weinberg, Million Concepts LLC
- Christian Weinert, Royal Holloway, University of London
- Primal Wijesekera, ICSI & UC Berkeley
- Christo Wilson, Northeastern University
- Yunming Xiao, University of Michigan
- Xusheng Xiao, Arizona State University
- Luyi Xing, Indiana University Bloomington
- Yixi Xu, Microsoft
- Diwen Xue, University of Michigan
- Yaxing Yao, Virginia Tech
- Arkady Yerukhimovich, George Washington University
- Leo Zhang, Griffith University
- Shaohu Zhang, University of North Carolina at Pembroke
- Zhiyi Zhang, Meta
- Ziming Zhao, Northeastern University
- Yifeng Zheng, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen
- Yixin Zou, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy
- Web Chairs (publicity25@petsymposium.org)
- Kat Hanna
- Mathilde Raynal, EPFL
- Sofia Celi, Brave
- Social Media Chair (social@petsymposium.org)
- Smirity Kaushik, University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign
- Publication Chairs (publication25@petsymposium.org)
- Pouneh Nikkhah Bahrami, University of California, Davis
- Ryan Wails, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory & Georgetown University
- PET Award Chairs (award-chairs25@petsymposium.org)
- Awais RashidUniversity of Bristol
- Damon McCoyNew York University
- Sponsorship Chairs (sponsorship@petsymposium.org)
- Steven Murdoch, University College London
- Susan McGregor, Columbia University
- Infrastructure Chairs
- Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project
- Ian Goldberg, University of Waterloo
- Stipend Chairs (pets2025-stipend@petsymposium.org)
- Susan McGregor, Columbia University
- Marvin Ramokapane, University of Bristol
- Smriti Kaushik, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- Christine Utz, Radboud University
- Artifact Chairs (artifact25@petsymposium.org)
- Maximilian Noppel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
- Miti Mazmudar, University of Waterloo
Artifact Review
PoPETs reviews and publishes digital artifacts related to its accepted
papers. This process aids in the reproducibility of results and allows
others to build on the work described in the paper. Artifact submissions
are requested from authors of all accepted papers, and although they are
optional, we strongly encourage you to submit your artifacts for review.
Possible artifacts include (but are not limited to):
- Source code (e.g., system implementations, proof of concepts)
- Datasets (e.g., network traces, raw study data)
- Scripts for data processing or simulations
- Machine-generated proofs
- Formal specifications
- Build environments (e.g., VMs, Docker containers, configuration scripts)
Artifacts are evaluated by the artifact review committee. The committee evaluates the artifacts to ensure that they provide an acceptable level of utility, and feedback is given to the authors. Issues considered include software bugs, readability of documentation, and appropriate licensing. After your artifact has been approved by the committee, we will accompany the paper link on petsymposium.org with a link to the artifact along with an artifact badge so that interested readers can find and use your artifact.
Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies
You are invited to submit nominations
for the 2025 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing
Technologies. The Caspar Bowden PET award is presented annually to researchers
who have made an outstanding contribution to the theory, design,
implementation, or deployment of privacy enhancing technologies. It is awarded
at PETS and carries a cash prize as well as a physical award statue. Any paper
by any author written in the area of privacy enhancing technologies is eligible
for nomination. However, the paper must have appeared in a refereed journal,
conference, or workshop with proceedings published in the period from April 1,
2023 until March 30, 2025.
Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award
A winner of the Andreas Pfitzmann PETS 2025 Best Student Paper Award will be
selected at PETS 2025. Papers written solely or primarily by a student who is
presenting the work to PETS 2025 are eligible for the award.
Artifact Award
A winner of the PETS 2025 Artifact Award will be announced at PETS 2025.
Artifacts for papers accepted to PETS 2025 are eligible for the award.
HotPETs and FOCI
As with the last several years, part of the symposium will be devoted to
HotPETs — the "hottest," most exciting research ideas still in a
still in a formative state — and FOCI, a workshop showcasing the latest
results from the Free and Open Communication on the Internet community. Further
information will be published on the PETS website in early 2025.