Call for Papers

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 27th PETS is expected to be an event with a physical gathering held in somewhere in Europe (TBA). 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 strongly 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 strictly 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. Please see the review process page for more information.

Submission Guidelines

The 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 2027 submission server. The submission URL is: https://submit.petsymposium.org/.

Important Dates for PETS 2027

All deadlines are 23:59:59 Anywhere on Earth (UTC-12)

Author Rebuttals

The authors will have a chance to rebut/answer reviewer concerns/questions through a short rebuttal phase. Reviewers are asked to take the rebuttals into consideration during the discussion.The authors will be able to submit a separate, 250-word rebuttal response to each individual review.

Revision Process

Authors who are 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 it 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

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 2027 may not be resubmitted until Issue 1 of Volume 2028. This policy enables authors ample time to substantially improve their papers and helps mitigate the overburdening of reviewers.

Scope (Refined for PoPETs 2027)

Papers must present novel research into privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) and the social, cultural, legal, or situational contexts in which they are used. Interdisciplinary work is welcome as long as it clearly shows how the contributions impact PETs.

Please follow the guidelines given below to ensure that your submission passes desk review and receives a full review by the program committee. You may ask the chairs for clarification of scope before the submission deadline.

• Papers must have strong ties to privacy in digital systems.
• The core contribution must be relevant to real-world privacy applications.
• The first page must clearly state how the work is relevant to real-world privacy applications.
• Relevance to real-world privacy applications must also be present throughout the entire paper by dedicating a substantial portion of the submission to work that is traditionally considered practical or applied.
• For contributions of theoretical nature (e.g., improvements on cryptographic primitives or improvements on differential privacy), the paper should provide details about how the proposed advances would be integrated into a real-world application.
• Improvements motivated by real applications, but presented in isolation without connection to those applications, do not demonstrate relevance in practice and are therefore out of scope.
• Papers with empirical evaluations must show a clear connection to privacy and to real-world applications.
• Evaluations that are based on purely synthetic datasets, or on non-privacy-relevant datasets (e.g., MNIST, CIFAR, or SVHN) must contain a well-marked paragraph explaining why the results of the evaluation can be extrapolated to real-world use cases where privacy is of relevance.
• Papers that treat privacy as a superficial application domain (e.g., if the only relationship to privacy is a privacy-related dataset) do not demonstrate relevance to real-world privacy problems and are therefore out of 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 (gc27@petsymposium.org)

TBD

Program Chairs/Co-Editors-in-Chief (pets27-chairs@petsymposium.org)

Rebekah Overdorf, Ruhr University Bochum

Tobias Pulls, Karlstad University

Vice Program Chairs/Associate Editors-in-Chief

Diogo Barradas, University of Waterloo

Shaanan Cohney, University of Melbourne

Anupam Das, North Carolina State University

Debajyoti Das, Lund University

Sepideh Ghanavati, University of Maine

Marc Juarez, University of Edinburgh

Pierre Laperdrix, Univ. Lille, CNRS, Inria

Simon Oya, University of British Columbia

Sajin Sasy, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Sandra Siby, New York University

Yixin Zou, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy

Quick Review Chair

Carmela Troncoso, EPFL & MPI-SP

Program Committee/Editorial Board

Aydin Abadi, Newcastle University

Behzad Abdolmaleki, University of Sheffield

Reham Aburas, American University of Sharjah

Archita Agarwal, MongoDB Research

Shashank Agrawal, Coinbase

Mashael S. Al-Sabah, Qatar Computing Research Institute

Shiza Ali, The George Washington University

Jorge Blasco Alís, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Daniele Antonioli, EURECOM

Chamikara Mahawaga Arachchige, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

Héber H. Arcolezi, ÉTS Montréal

Frederik Armknecht, University of Mannheim

Arjun Arunasalam, Florida International University

Hassan Asghar, Macquarie University

Christian Badertscher, IOG & Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Debabrota Basu, Inria Centre at University of Lille

Zinaida Benenson, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)

Alastair Beresford, University of Cambridge

Alex Berke, MIT

Yohan Beugin, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Gergely Biczok, Budapest University of Technology and Economics

Nataliia Bielova, Inria

Eleanor Birrell, Pomona College

Alexandra Boldyreva, Georgia Tech

Glencora Borradaile, Oregon State University

Sara Bouchenak, INSA Lyon

Quinn Burke, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Bogdan Carbunar, Florida International University

Anrin Chakraborti, University of Illinois at Chicago

Varun Chandrasekaran, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Sylvain Chatel, CISPA

Alishah Chator, Baruch College

Rahul Chatterjee, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Panos Chatzigiannis, Visa Research

Sherman S. M. Chow, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Lynn Chua, Google

Simone Colombo, King's College London

Mauro Conti, University of Padua

Jean-Francois Couchot, Université Marie et Louis Pasteur / FEMTO-ST Institute

Jedidiah Crandall, Arizona State University

Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University

Ana-Maria Cretu, CISPA

Shujie Cui, Monash University

Tianxiang Dai, Lancaster University Leipzig

Pubali Datta, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Nurullah Demir, Stanford University

Damien Desfontaines, Hiding Nemo

Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project

Ye Dong, National University of Singapore

Nir Drucker, IBM Research - Israel

Minxin Du, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Vasisht Duddu, University of Waterloo

Kasra Edalatnejad, TU Darmstadt

Tariq Elahi, University of Edinburgh

Steven Englehardt, DuckDuckGo

Zeki Erkin, Delft University of Technology

Birhanu Eshete, University of Michigan, Dearborn

Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, EPFL

Yuanyuan Feng, University of Vermont

Ellis Fenske, US Naval Academy

Jack Fitzsimons, Oblivious

Imane Fouad, University Mohammed VI Polytechnic (UM6P)

Alexander Gamero-Garrido, University of California, Davis

Simson Garfinkel, BasisTech, LLC

Christina Garman, Purdue University

Paolo Gasti, New York Institute of technology

Pierrick Gaudry, LORIA

Mengmeng Ge, Monash University

Marilyn George, MongoDB Research

Diksha Goel, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

Prosanta Gope, University of Sheffield

Matteo Große-Kampmann, Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences

Michele Guerra, New York University, Abu Dhabi

Zichen Gui, University of Georgia

Iness Ben Guirat, Université Libre de Bruxelles

Ece Gumusel, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Emre Gürsoy, Koç University

Thomas Haines, Australian National University

Anisa Halimi, IBM Research

Harry Halpin, Nym

Meng Hao, Singapore Management University

Rakibul Hasan, Arizona State University

Weijia He, University of Southampton

David Heath, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Urs Hengartner, University of Waterloo

Dominik Herrmann, University of Bamberg

Stephen Herwig, William & Mary

Hanan Hibshi, Carnegie Mellon University

Chris Hicks, The Alan Turing Institute

Thang Hoang, Virginia Tech

Jaap-Henk Hoepman, Radboud University

Nick Hopper, University of Minnesota

Yalame Hossein, Bosch Research

Hsu-Chun Hsiao, National Taiwan University

Yidan Hu, Rochester Institute of Technology

Muhammad Ikram, Macquarie University

Murtuza Jadliwala, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Aaron D Jaggard, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Najeeb Jebreel, Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Tianxi Ji, Texas Tech University

Wenbo Jiang, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Aaron Johnson, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Tushar Jois, City College of New York

Taeho Jung, University of Notre Dame

Kangsoo Jung, Inria

Nesrine Kaaniche, Institut Polytechnique de Paris

Bailey Kacsmar, University of Alberta

Stefan Katzenbeisser, University of Passau

Smirity Kaushik, The George Washington University

Megha Khosla, Delft University of Technology

Youngil Kim, UC Irvine

Agnieszka Kitkowska, Jönköping University

Nitin Kohli, UC Berkeley

Katharina Kohls, Ruhr University Bochum

Stefan Köpsell, The Barkhausen Institut

Lindrit Kqiku, University of Göttingen

Piyush Kumar, IIT Delhi

Alptekin Küpçü, Koç University

Russell W. F. Lai, Aalto University

Tu Le, The University of Alabama

Adam Lee, University of Pittsburgh

Arnaud Legout, Inria

Zengpeng Li, Shandong University

Ming Li, The University of Texas at Arlington

Zhiqiang Lin, The Ohio State University

Jian Liu, Zhejiang University

Maggie Liu, RMIT University

Shinan Liu, University of Hong Kong

Martin Lopatka, Unaffiliated

Qian Lou, University of Central Florida

Wouter Lueks, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Bo Luo, The University of Kansas

Prianka Mandal, William & Mary

Lilika Markatou, Delft University of Technology

Athina Markopoulou, University of California, Irvine

Karola Marky, Ruhr University Bochum

Abby Marsh, Macalester College

Rahat Masood, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Alexander Master, West Point

Nick Mathewson, The Tor Project

Miti Mazmudar, University of Calgary

McKenna McCall, Colorado State University

Shagufta Mehnaz, The Pennsylvania State University

David Mestel, Maastricht University

Abraham Mhaidli, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy

Nicholas Micallef, Swansea University

Antonios Michalas, Tampere University

Jelena Mirkovic, USC Information Sciences Institute

Katerina Mitrokotsa, University of St. Gallen

David Mohaisen, University of Central Florida

Majid Mollaeefar, Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Veelasha Moonsamy, Ruhr University Bochum

Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, IMDEA Software Institute

Dimitris Mouris, Snap Inc.

Adwait Nadkarni, William & Mary

Sashank Narain, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Joe Near, University of Vermont

Boel Nelson, University of Copenhagen

Nam Ngo, Ethereum Foundation

Benjamin Nguyen, INSA Centre Val de Loire

Shirin Nilizadeh, The University of Texas at Arlington

Rishab Nithyanand, University of Iowa

Melek Önen, EURECOM

Ozgur Ozmen, Arizona State University

Dimitrios Papadopoulos, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Stefano Paraboschi, University of Bergamo

Jeongeun Park, NTNU

Hannaneh B. Pasandi, UC Berkeley

Sameer Patil, University of Utah

Christopher Patton, Cloudflare

Balazs Pejo, Budapest University of Technology and Economics

Amogh Pradeep, CrowdStrike

Apostolos Pyrgelis, RISE

Chenxi Qiu, University of North Texas

Yiting Qu, CISPA

Elizabeth Quaglia, Royal Holloway, University of London

Mohammad Saidur Rahman, University of Texas at El Paso

Amir Rahmati, Stony Brook University

Marvin Ramokapane, University of Bristol

Jan Ramon, Inria

Thilina Ranbaduge, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

Silvio Ranise, Fondazione Bruno Kessler; University of Trento

Abbas Razaghpanah, UC Berkeley

Delphine Reinhardt, University of Göttingen

Pascal Reisert, University of Stuttgart

Vera Rimmer, KU Leuven

Florentin Rochet, UNamur

Franziska Roesner, University of Washington

Ma Rongjun, Technical University of Valencia

Stefanie Roos, RPTU Kaiserslautern

Walter Rudametkin, University of Rennes / IRISA

Sushmita Ruj, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Alejandro Russo, Chalmers University of Technology

Cesar Sabater, LIRIS

Rei Safavi-Naini, University of Calgary

Sinem Sav, Bilkent University

Nitesh Saxena, Texas A&M University

Florian Schaub, University of Michigan

Paul Schmitt, Cal Poly

Theodor Schnitzler, Maastricht University

Dominique Schröder, TU Wien

Savio Sciancalepore, Eindhoven University of Technology

Sruthi Sekar, IIT Bombay

Wendy Seltzer, Independent

Mahmood Sharif, Tel Aviv University

Micah Sherr, Georgetown University

Sudheesh Singanamalla, Apple Inc.

Sachin Singh, University of Utah

Daniel Slamanig, Universität der Bundeswehr München

Georgios Smaragdakis, Delft University of Technology

Peter Snyder, Brave Software

Kostas Solomos, Brandeis University

Xiangfu Song, Nanyang Technological University

Claudio Soriente, GMV Spain

Thorsten Strufe, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Jose M Such, INGENIO (CSIC-UPV)

Paul Syverson, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Sajedul Talukder, University of Texas at El Paso

Rajat Tandon, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hammas Bin Tanveer, University of Iowa

Jan Tolsdorf, George Washington University

Rahmadi Trimananda, Comcast Cyber Security (CCS) Research

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

Adithya Vadapalli, IIT Kanpur

Tavish Vaidya, Google

Luke Valenta, Cloudflare

Dimitri Van Landuyt, KU Leuven

Saraswathy Ramanathapuram Vancheeswaran, HP Inc., Privacy Innovation and Assurance

Mayank Varia, Boston University

Yash Vekaria, University of California, Davis

Fernando Virdia, University of Surrey

Roman Vitenberg, University of Oslo

Daniel Votipka, Tufts University

Riad S. Wahby, Carnegie Mellon University

Nan Wang, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

Han Wang, The University of Kansas

Rui Wen, Institute of Science Tokyo

Christo Wilson, Northeastern University

Yunming Xiao, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

Jing Xu, University of York

Diwen Xue, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Yaxing Yao, Johns Hopkins University

Kevin Yeo, Google

Arkady Yerukhimovich, The George Washington University

Maryam Zarezadeh, The Barkhausen Institut

Zhikun Zhang, Zhejiang University

Yifeng Zheng, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Mengxin Zheng, University of Central Florida

Zhuolin Yang, University of Arizona

Noé Zufferey, ETH Zurich

Web Chairs (web27@petsymposium.org)

Sofia Celi, Brave

Alisha Ukani, UC San Diego

Social Media Chair (social@petsymposium.org)

Smirity Kaushik, George Washington University

Publication Chairs (publication27@petsymposium.org)

TBD

Safe Spaces Contacts (safe-spaces-pets@petsymposium.org)

Susan McGregor, Columbia University

Kovila Coopamootoo, King's College London

HotPETs Chairs (hotpets27@petsymposium.org)

TBD

PET Award Chairs (award-chairs27@petsymposium.org)

TBD

Best Student Paper Award Chair

TBD

Best Student Paper Award Committee

TBD

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 (stipend27@petsymposium.org)

TBD

Artifact Chairs (artifact27@petsymposium.org)

Yohan Beugin, University of Wisconsin-Madison

TBD

Artifact Infrastructure Chair

Tobias Fiebig, measurement.network

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.

Artifact Review Committee

TBD

Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies
You are invited to submit nominations for the 2027 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (TBD). 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, 2026 until March 30, 2027.

Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award
The Andreas Pfitzmann PETS 2027 Best Student Paper Award is given to papers written solely or primarily by a student who is invited to present the work to PETS 2027.

Artifact Award
A winner of the PETS 2027 Artifact Award will be announced at PETS 2027. Artifacts for papers accepted to PETS 2027 are eligible for the award.

HotPETs and FOCI
A 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 2027.