FSE 2026

Paper Submission

There are two submission deadlines that have already passed, for ToSC 2025 issues 2 and 3. While these papers will be included in the conference, the deadlines are not displayed here. Below are the upcoming deadlines for the other two issues of ToSC that will also be included in the conference.

Instructions for authors

Submissions must not substantially duplicate work that any of the authors has published elsewhere or has submitted in parallel to a journal or any other conference/workshop that has 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 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, acknowledgments, 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. The iacrtrans class documentation on Github includes examples, as well as instructions to easily convert a paper written with the llncs class.

The page limit for regular papers is 20 pages excluding the 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 ending the title with "(Long Paper)". 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 event 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 paper 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.

The IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology journal only accepts electronic submissions in PDF format. A detailed description of the electronic submission procedure is available on the ToSC submission page. The authors of submitted papers guarantee that their paper will be presented at the FSE 2026 conference if it is accepted.

In order to improve the quality of the review process, authors will be given the opportunity to enter a rebuttal after receiving the reviews. The rebuttal period is noted on the important dates lists above.

Submissions not meeting these guidelines risk rejection without consideration of their merits.

Articles will not be reviewed by reviewers who have a conflict of interest with at least one author of the submission. Submissions must adhere to the IACR policy on conflicts of interest, which is also outlined below.

Conflicts of interest

Authors, program committee members, and reviewers must follow the IACR Policy on Conflicts of Interest, available from https://www.iacr.org/docs/.

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 reviewer¹ has an automatic COI with an author if:

• one is or was the thesis advisor to the other, no matter how long ago;
• they shared an institutional affiliation within the prior two years²;
• they published two or more jointly authored works in the last three years³; or
• they are immediate family members⁴

A reviewer has an automatic COI with a submission if:

• the reviewer has an automatic COI with any of its authors;
• the reviewer is authoring a paper (in submission⁵ or in preparation) whose content substantially overlaps with that of the submission;
• the reviewer has made a contribution to the submission (i.e. the submission is the result of a collaboration that did not result in the reviewer's authorship)

Any further COIs of importance should be separately disclosed. 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.

COIs are not restricted to automatic ones, others being possible. COIs beyond automatic COIs could involve financial, intellectual, or personal interests. Examples include closely related technical work, cooperation in the form of joint projects or grant applications, business relationships, close personal friendships, instances of personal enmity. Full transparency is of utmost importance, authors and reviewers must disclose to the chairs or editor any circumstances that they think may create bias, even if it does not raise to the level of a COI. The editor or program chairs will decide if such circumstances should be treated as a COI.