8th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
July 23 - July 25, 2008

Call for Papers

http://petsymposium.org/2008/

Important Dates:

All deadlines are FIRM - no extensions.

Paper submissions are now CLOSED.

Privacy and anonymity are increasingly important in the online world. Corporations, governments, and other organizations are realizing and exploiting their power to track users and their behavior. Approaches to protecting individuals, groups, but also companies and governments from profiling and censorship include decentralization, encryption, distributed trust, and automated policy disclosure.

The 8th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium addresses the design and realization of such privacy services for the Internet and other communication networks by bringing together anonymity and privacy experts from around the world to discuss recent advances and new perspectives.

The symposium seeks submissions from academia and industry presenting novel research on all theoretical and practical aspects of privacy technologies, as well as experimental studies of fielded systems. We encourage submissions from other communities such as law and business that present their perspectives on technological issues. In a departure from previous years, the symposium proceedings will be available at the event, rather than after it. They will continue to be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Suggested topics include but are not restricted to:

General Chair:
Claudia Diaz, K.U. Leuven
Program Chairs:
Nikita Borisov, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ian Goldberg, University of Waterloo
Program Committee:
Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University
Mikhail Atallah, Purdue University
Michael Backes, Saarland University and Max-Planck Institute for Software Systems
Mira Belenkiy, Brown University
Alastair Beresford, University of Cambridge
Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
George Danezis, Microsoft Research Cambridge
Claudia Diaz, K.U. Leuven
Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project
Simson Garfinkel, Naval Postgraduate School
Philippe Golle, Palo Alto Research Center
Rachel Greenstadt, Harvard University
Thomas Heydt-Benjamin, IBM Research Zurich
Apu Kapadia, Dartmouth College
Bradley Malin, Vanderbilt University
Nick Mathewson, The Tor Project
David Molnar, University of California, Berkeley
Steven Murdoch, University of Cambridge
Andreas Pfitzmann, Dresden University of Technology
Andrei Serjantov, The Free Haven Project
Paul Syverson, Naval Research Laboratory
Gene Tsudik, University of California, Irvine
Matthew Wright, University of Texas at Arlington
Rebecca Wright, Rutgers University
HotPETs chairs:
Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project
Thomas Heydt-Benjamin, IBM Research Zurich
Len Sassaman, K.U. Leuven

A new feature this year is the HotPETs session. In addition to the usual "talk for 3-5 minutes on anything you like" rump session, there will be a session called HotPETs, at which you must be invited to speak (but of course all are encouraged to attend). For this session we invite submission of your hottest most exciting ideas that are still in a formative state. Submissions need not be technical in nature; we welcome challenges from other fields whereby our audience may learn about real world needs that require new research and solutions. Our intent is to bring new questions, approaches, and problems to our privacy community for discussion, feedback, and consideration of new approaches based on the diverse expertise of our attendees.

HotPETs speakers will get 10-15 minutes (exact schedule to be determined later) to present, and time will be allocated for discussion and feedback. HotPETs presentations will not be published in the PETS proceedings; this will allow authors to subsequently publish the work, either in a future PETS or elsewhere, when it is mature. If you wish to be invited to speak at HotPETs, send an application to <hotpets08@petsymposium.org> by Friday, April 11, 20:00 UTC. An application consists of a description of the work to be presented, ranging from a 3-page extended abstract up to the length of a PETS submission. The HotPETs chairs along with selected other reviewers will choose a number of submissions to be presented in the HotPETs session. Since part of the goal of HotPETs is to generate discussion and feedback for burgeoning ideas during the session, there will be no detailed written feedback on submissions; only a one-bit accepted/not-accepted response will be provided. It is expected that speakers who are accepted for HotPETs will attend PETS and speak in the HotPETs session.

Papers to be submitted to the main PET Symposium should be at most 15 pages excluding the bibliography and well-marked appendices (using an 11-point font), and at most 20 pages total. Submission of shorter papers is strongly encouraged whenever appropriate. Papers must conform to the Springer LNCS style (in which the text area per page is a little smaller than 5" x 7 3/4"). Follow the "Information for Authors" link at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. Papers not following these instructions risk being rejected without consideration of their merits.

Submitted papers must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings.

Reviewers of submitted papers are not required to read the appendices and the paper should be intelligible without them. The paper should start with the title and an abstract. The introduction should give some background and summarize the contributions of the paper at a level appropriate for a non-specialist reader. Submitted papers should be anonymized by removing or sanitizing author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, and obvious self-references. Proceedings will be published by Springer and made available at the symposium.

By submitting a paper, you agree that if it is accepted, you will sign a paper distribution agreement allowing for publication, and also that an author of the paper will register for the symposium and present the paper there. Our current working agreement with Springer is that authors will retain copyright on their own works while assigning an exclusive 3-year distribution license to Springer. Authors may still post their papers on their own Web sites. See http://petsymposium.org/2008/2007-springer-form.pdf for the 2007 version of this agreement.

Paper submissions must be received by February 19th, 2008 at 20:00 UTC. We will acknowledge all submissions manually by email. If you do not receive an acknowledgment within a few days (or one day, if you are submitting right at the deadline), then contact the program committee chairs directly to resolve the problem. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent to authors by April 8th, 2008 and authors will have the opportunity to revise their papers for the proceedings version due on May 2nd, 2008.

We also invite proposals of up to 2 pages for panel discussions or other relevant presentations. In your proposal, (1) describe the nature of the presentation and why it is appropriate to the symposium, (2) suggest a duration for the presentation (ideally between 45 and 90 minutes), (3) give brief descriptions of the presenters, and (4) indicate which presenters have confirmed their availability for the presentation if it is scheduled. Otherwise, submit your proposal by email as described above, including the designation of a contact author. The program committee will consider presentation proposals along with other symposium events, and will respond by the paper decision date with an indication of its interest in scheduling the event. The proceedings will contain 1-page abstracts of the presentations that take place at the symposium. Each contact author for an accepted panel proposal must prepare and submit this abstract in the Springer LNCS style by the "Camera-ready copy for proceedings" deadline date.