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.

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

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

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

TBA

Program Committee/Editorial Board:

TBA

Publicity/Web Chairs

Mathilde Raynal, EPFL

Publication Chairs

Pouneh Nikkhah Bahrami, University of California, Davis

Artifact Chairs

Maximilian Noppel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Infrastructure Chairs

Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project

Ian Goldberg, 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.