IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

The IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P, IEEE SSP), also known as the Oakland Conference, is an annual conference focusing on topics related to computer security and privacy. The conference was founded in 1980 by Stan Ames and George Davida and is considered to be among the top conferences in the field.^[1][2] The conference has a single track, meaning that all presentations and sessions are held sequentially in one venue. The conference also follows a double-blind review process, where both the authors' and reviewers' identities are concealed from each other to ensure impartiality and fairness during peer review process.

The conference started as a small workshop where researchers exchanged ideas on computer security and privacy, with an early emphasis on theoretical research. During these initial years, there was a divide between cryptographers and system security researchers, with cryptographers often leaving sessions focused on systems security. This issue was eventually addressed by combining cryptography and system security discussions in the same sessions. In 2011, the conference moved to San Francisco due to venue size concerns.

The conference has a low acceptance rate due to it having only a single track. The review process for the conference tends to evaluate the papers on a variety of criteria with a focus on novelty. In 2022, researchers interviewed reviewers from top security conferences like IEEE S&P and found that the review process of the conferences was exploitable due to inconsistent reviewing standards across reviewers. The reviewers recommended mentoring new reviewer with a focus on reviewing quality to mitigate this issue.

In 2021, researchers from the University of Minnesota submitted a paper to the conference where they tried to introduce bugs into the Linux kernel, a widely-used operating system component without Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval. The paper was accepted and was scheduled to be published, however, after criticism from the Linux kernel community, the authors of the paper retracted the paper and issued a public apology. In response to this incident, IEEE S&P committed to adding a ethics review step in their paper review process and improving their documentation surrounding ethics declarations in research papers.