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 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 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 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)

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

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

Igor Bilogrevic, Google

Eleanor Birrell, Pomona College

Cecylia Bocovich, The Tor Project

Hannah (Hannaneh) B. Pasandi (Barahouei Pasandi), University of California - Berkeley

Joe Calandrino, Federal Trade Commission

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, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

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

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

Markus Duermuth, Leibniz University Hannover

Christoph Egger, Université Paris Cité, CNRS, IRIF

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, Northeastern University

Natasha Fernandes, Macquarie University, Australia

Bryan Ford, EPFL

Imane FOUAD, Inria/Univ of Lille

Kevin Gallagher, NOVA LINCS, NOVA School of Science and Technology

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

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, University College London

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

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

Panagiotis Papadopoulos, iProov Limited

Jeongeun Park, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

Dario Pasquini, George Mason University

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

Florentin Rochet, UNamur

Andy Rupp, University of Luxembourg and KASTEL SRL

Kavous Salehzadeh Niksirat, EPFL

Sajin Sasy, University of Waterloo

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, Imperial College London

Tjerand Silde, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Lucy Simko, George Washington University

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, UC San Diego

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

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

Xusheng Xiao, Arizona State University

Luyi Xing, Indiana University Bloomington

Yixi Xu, Microsoft

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, University at Buffalo

Yixin Zou, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy

Publicity/Web Chairs

Mathilde Raynal, EPFL

Publication Chairs (publication25@petsymposium.org)

Pouneh Nikkhah Bahrami, University of California, Davis

Ryan Wails, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory & Georgetown University

Infrastructure Chairs

Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project

Ian Goldberg, University of Waterloo

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.