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Submission deadline: 1 November 2026
Publication: May/June 2027
Now, more than ever, it is clear that security and privacy are real-world challenges affecting companies, institutions, and individuals in all aspects of daily life. The research community has contributed significantly towards addressing these challenges through finding impactful security vulnerabilities and developing innovative solutions that are now widely deployed. However, achieving this type of direct real-world impact comes with its own set of challenges, which often go beyond what would typically be presented in a research paper.
This special issue solicits articles describing research that has had a direct impact on real-world security and privacy, going beyond a scientific publication. This could range from identifying vulnerabilities in deployed systems through to developing solutions that have been used in practice. Importantly, articles for this special issue should focus on the specific challenges encountered in the process of achieving real-world impact, and how they were overcome. These could include experiences with Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD), technical challenges in deploying a mitigation, or socio-technical challenges in navigating ethical, legal, or regulatory considerations. If applicable, articles can group together experiences from several different projects or papers and describe their overall impact.
An ideal article would demonstrate that security and privacy research can have direct real world impact beyond publications, and summarize the lessons learned from that process to help other researchers achieve similar goals. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, please visit the Author Information page. As stated in the Author Information, peer-reviewed articles should run between 4,900 to 7,200 words, including all main body, abstract, keyword, bibliography, biography, and table text. The word count should include 250 words for each table and figure. There should be no more than 15 references. The abstract word limit is 50 words. Please submit full papers through the IEEE Author Portal system, and be sure to select the special-issue or special-section name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the IEEE Author Portal. All submitted manuscripts will undergo a single-anonymous peer review.
In addition to submitting your paper to IEEE Security & Privacy, you are also encouraged to upload the data related to your paper to IEEE DataPort. IEEE DataPort is IEEE's data platform that supports the storage and publishing of datasets while also providing access to thousands of research datasets. Uploading your dataset to IEEE DataPort will strengthen your paper and will support research reproducibility. Your paper and the dataset can be linked, providing a good opportunity for you to increase the number of citations you receive. Data can be uploaded to IEEE DataPort prior to submitting your paper or concurrent with the paper submission. Thank you!
Contact the guest editors at sp3-27@computer.org.
