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 26th PETS is expected to be a hybrid event with a physical gathering (location TBD) 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 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 2026 submission server. The submission URL is: https://submit.petsymposium.org/.

Important Dates for PETS 2026

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

Author Rebuttals (Changes for 2026)

As in previous years, 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. New for 2026: The authors will be able to submit a separate, 250-word rebuttal response to each individual review (rather than a single response that addresses all reviews).

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 2026 may not be resubmitted until Issue 1 of Volume 2027. This policy enables authors ample time to substantially improve their papers and helps mitigate the overburdening of reviewers.

Scope

Papers submitted to 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. PoPETs 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.

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.

(1) Privacy enhancing technologies: Submissions must have strong ties to privacy. The paper's relevance to privacy should be strongly motivated, and ties to privacy should be presented throughout the paper. PoPETs is open to topics from the wider area of security and privacy, but authors of submissions must clearly explain how their work serves to improve or understand privacy in technology.

(2) Privacy applications in real systems: Submissions must contribute to real privacy applications that run in real systems. Submissions must provide substantial evidence of this contribution, for example, by dedicating a substantial portion of the submission to work that is traditionally considered practical or applied (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.).

Special note for theoretical work: Submissions that make primary contributions that are highly theoretical in nature (e.g., to theoretical cryptography and primitives or related areas) are not directly out of scope. But they have a particularly high risk of being desk-rejected if they do not clearly tie their contributions to privacy enhancing technologies and to privacy applications in real systems. This applies in particular to papers that include proofs as a primary contribution (when they are not a primary contribution, proofs should usually appear in the Appendix). Evidence of ties to real systems can come in many forms, but a particularly preferred one is an evaluation of the theoretical contribution in the context of real systems as outlined above. Authors should make a concerted effort to address both points of scope. This focus is necessary because PoPETs is not well-equipped to review and provide high quality feedback to highly theoretical contributions without relation to real applications with privacy implications.

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 ([email protected])

TBD, TBD

Program Chairs/Co-Editors-in-Chief ([email protected])

Gunes Acar, Radboud University

Rob Jansen, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Vice Program Chairs/Associate Editors-in-Chief

Diogo Barradas, University of Waterloo

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

Sepideh Ghanavati, University of Maine

Marc Juarez, University of Edinburgh

Pierre Laperdrix, CNRS

Rishab Nithyanand, University of Iowa

Simon Oya, University of British Columbia

Tobias Pulls, Karlstad University

Sandra Siby, New York University

Christine Utz, Radboud University

Yixin Zou, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy

Desk Review Chair

Carmela Troncoso, EPFL

Program Committee/Editorial Board:

Yasemin Acar, Paderborn University & The George Washington University

Shashank Agrawal, Coinbase

Mashael Al-Sabah, Qatar Computing Research Institute

Eman Alashwali, King Abdulaziz University (KAU)

Mário Alvim, UFMG

Daniele Antonioli, EURECOM

Frederik Armknecht, University of Mannheim

Arjun Arunasalam, Purdue University

Erman Ayday, Case Western Reserve University

Hannaneh B. Pasandi, UC Berkeley

Christian Badertscher, IOG & Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Debabrota Basu, Inria Centre at University of Lille

Iness Ben Guirat, Université Libre de Bruxelles

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

Yohan Beugin, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Gergely Biczok, CrySyS Lab, Budapest Univ. of Technology and Economics

Nataliia Bielova, Inria

Marina Blanton, University at Buffalo

Jorge Blasco, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Alexandra Boldyreva, Georgia Institute of Technology

Glencora Borradaile, Oregon State University

Xavier Bultel, INSA Centre Val de Loire

Quinn Burke, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Joseph Calandrino, Unaffiliated

Niklas Carlsson, Linköping University

Sofia Celi, Brave & University of Bristol

Z. Berkay Celik, Purdue University

Anrin Chakraborti, University of Illinois at Chicago

Sylvain Chatel, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Alishah Chator, Baruch College

Rahul Chatterjee, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Panagiotis Chatzigiannis, Visa Research

Shan Chen, Southern University of Science and Technology

Yimin Chen, University of Massachusetts Lowell

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

Lynn Chua, Google

Shaanan Cohney, University of Melbourne

Simone Colombo, King’s College London

Tianshuo Cong, Tsinghua University

Kovila Coopamootoo, King's College London

Jedidiah Crandall, Arizona State University

Ana-Maria Cretu, EPFL

Ha Dao, MPI-INF

Debajyoti Das, Lund University

Sanchari Das, George Mason University

Edwin Dauber, Widener University

Alex Davidson, LASIGE, Universidade de Lisboa

Martin Degeling, Independent

Nurullah Demir, Institute for Internet Security

Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project

Ye Dong, National University of Singapore

Jannik Dreier, Université de Lorraine, CNRS, Inria, LORIA

Markus Duermuth, Leibniz University Hannover

Kasra Edalatnejad, TU-Darmstadt

Tariq Elahi, University of Edinburgh

Roya Ensafi, University of Michigan

Zeki Erkin, TU Delft

Birhanu Eshete, University of Michigan, Dearborn

Saba Eskandarian, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, The DECENT Lab

Sascha Fahl, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Alvaro Feal, ThousandEyes (Cisco)

Ellis Fenske, US Naval Academy

Natasha Fernandes, Macquarie University, Australia

Tobias Fiebig, Max Planck Institute for Informatics

Imane Fouad, University Mohammed VI Polytechnic (UM6P)

Julien Gamba, Cisco ThousandEyes

Sébastien Gambs, Université du Québec à Montréal

Alexander Gamero-Garrido, UC Davis

Chaya Ganesh, Indian Institute of Science

Peng Gao, Virginia Tech

Simson Garfinkel, BasisTech, LLC

Pierrick Gaudry, CNRS

Marilyn George, MongoDB

Diksha Goel, CSIRO's Data61, Australia

Prosanta Gope, University of Sheffield

Devashish Gosain, IIT Bombay

Rachel Greenstadt, New York University

Thomas Gross, Newcastle University, United Kingdom

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

Michele Guerra, New York University, Abu Dhabi

Zichen Gui, University of Georgia

Johanna Gunawan, Maastricht University

Divya Gupta, Microsoft Research

Emre Gursoy, Koç University

Florian Hahn, University of Twente

Thomas Haines, Australian National University

Anisa Halimi, IBM Research

Rakibul Hasan, Arizona State University

Xinlei He, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

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

Jaap-Henk Hoepman, Radboud University

Roberto Hoyle, Oberlin College

Yidan Hu, Rochester Institute of Technology

Mathias Humbert, University of Lausanne

Muhammad Ikram, Macquarie University

Mazharul Islam, Uber Technologies / University of Wisconsin—Madison

Murtuza Jadliwala, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Aaron D. Jaggard, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Martin Johns, TU Braunschweig

Aaron Johnson, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Tushar Jois, City College of New York

Kangsoo Jung, Inria

Taeho Jung, University of Notre Dame

Nesrine Kaaniche, Télécom SudParis, Institut Polytechnique de Paris

Smirity Kaushik, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

Alexander Knop, Google Research

Nadim Kobeissi, Symbolic Software, Cure53

Simon Koch, Institute for Application Security (TU-Braunschweig), Germany

Katharina Kohls, Ruhr University Bochum

Markulf Kohlweiss, University of Edinburgh and IOG

Roman Kolcun, University of Cambridge

Konrad Kollnig, Law & Tech Lab, Maastricht University

Dhruv Kuchhal, Amazon

Alptekin Küpçü, Koç University

Russell W. F. Lai, Aalto University

Duc Le, Visa Research

Hieu Le, Independent Researcher

Adam Lee, University of Pittsburgh

Jaewoo Lee, University of Georgia

Arnaud Legout, Centre Inria d'Université Côte d'Azur

Ming Li, University of Texas at Arlington

Ninghui Li, Purdue University

Tianshi Li, Northeastern University

Zengpeng Li, Shandong University

Zheng Li, Shandong University

Kaitai Liang, TU Delft

Martin Lopatka, EPAM Systems

Kangjie Lu, University of Minnesota

Wouter Lueks, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Bo Luo, The University of Kansas

Saeed Mahloujifar, Meta

Sunil Manandhar, IBM Research

Prianka Mandal, William & Mary

Pasin Manurangsi, Google Research

Piotr Mardziel,

Lilika Markatou, TU Delft

Athina Markopoulou, UC Irvine

Karola Marky, Ruhr University Bochum

Alexander Master, United States Military Academy

Travis Mayberry, US Naval Academy

Shagufta Mehnaz, Penn State University

Maryam Mehrnezhad, Royal Holloway University of London

David Mestel, Maastricht University

Abraham Mhaidli, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP)

Antonis Michalas, Tampere University

Ian Miers, University of Maryland

Mohsen Minaei, Visa Research

Jelena Mirkovic, USC Information Sciences Institute

Alan Mislove, Northeastern University

Katerina Mitrokotsa, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

David Mohaisen, University of Central Florida

Reham Mohamed Aburas, American University of Sharjah, UAE

Veelasha Moonsamy, Ruhr University Bochum

Adwait Nadkarni, William & Mary

Sashank Narain, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Joseph Near, University of Vermont

Boel Nelson, University of Copenhagen

Nam Ngo, Privacy + Scaling Explorations, Ethereum Foundation

Melek Önen, EURECOM

Muslum Ozgur Ozmen, Arizona State University

Catuscia Palamidessi, Inria

Omkant Pandey, Stony Brook University

Prajwal Panzade, Old Dominion University

Panagiotis Papadopoulos, iProov Limited

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

Christopher Patton, Cloudflare

Sai Teja Peddinti, Google

Giuseppe Persiano, University of Salerno

Amogh Pradeep, CrowdStrike

Apostolos Pyrgelis, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

Chenxi Qiu, University of North Texas

Elizabeth Quaglia, Royal Holloway, University of London

Sazzadur Rahaman, University of Arizona

Mohammad Saidur Rahman, University of Texas at El Paso

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

Thilina Ranbaduge, CSIRO, Australia

Abbas Razaghpanah, ICSI and Cisco

Joel Reardon, University of Calgary

Christian Rechberger, TU Graz

Pascal Reisert, University of Stuttgart

Daniel Roche, U.S. Naval Academy

Luc Rocher, University of Oxford

Florentin Rochet, UNamur

Walter Rudametkin, University of Rennes / IRISA / Inria

Sushmita Ruj, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Andy Rupp, University of Luxembourg and KASTEL SRL

Reihaneh Safavi-Naini, University of Calgary

Kavous Salehzadeh Niksirat, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy

Pratik Sarkar, Supra Research

Sajin Sasy, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Sinem Sav, Bilkent University

Nitesh Saxena, Texas A&M University

Florian Schaub, University of Michigan

Theodor Schnitzler, Maastricht University

Phillipp Schoppmann, Google

Dominique Schröder, TU Wien

Savio Sciancalepore, TU Eindhoven (TU/e)

Sruthi Sekar, IIT Bombay

Wendy Seltzer, Independent

Siamak Shahandashti, University of York, UK

Ryan Sheatsley, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Yan Shvartzshnaider, York University

Mark Simkin, Flashbots

Lucy Simko, Barnard College

Sachin Kumar Singh, University of Utah

Daniel Slamanig, Universität der Bundeswehr München

Georgios Smaragdakis, Delft University of Technology

Peter Snyder, Brave Software

Claudio Soriente, NEC Laboratories Europe

Theresa Stadler, EPFL

Thorsten Strufe, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Jose Such,

Wei Sun, Wichita State University

Yixin Sun, University of Virginia

Ajith Suresh, Technology Innovation Institute (TII), UAE

Rajat Tandon, Juniper Networks Inc.

Jan Tolsdorf, The George Washington University

Rahmadi Trimananda, Comcast Cybersecurity & Privacy Research

Carmela Troncoso, EPFL

Hikaru Tsuchida, Saitama Institute of Technology

Fatih Turkmen, University of Groningen

Adithya Vadapalli, IIT Kanpur

Luke Valenta, Cloudflare, Inc.

Tom Van Goethem, Google / KU Leuven

Eugene Vasserman, Kansas State University

Yash Vekaria, University of California, Davis

Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam, Ligero Inc.

Coby Wang, Visa Research

Han Wang, The University of Kansas

Haoyu Wang, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Mona Wang, Princeton University

Mor Weiss, Bar-Ilan University

Christo Wilson, Northeastern University

Xusheng Xiao, Arizona State University

Yunming Xiao, University of Michigan

Luyi Xing, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Indiana University

Jing Xu, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Diwen Xue, University of Michigan

Hossein Yalame, Bosch Research

Yaxing Yao, Virginia Tech

Kevin Yeo, Google

Thomas Zacharias, University of Glasgow

Shaohu Zhang, University of North Carolina at Pembroke

Yanjun Zhang, University of Technology Sydney

Zhikun Zhang, Zhejiang University

Ziming Zhao, Northeastern University

Yifeng Zheng, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Infrastructure Chairs

Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project

Ian Goldberg, 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 2026 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, 2025 until March 30, 2026.

Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award
A winner of the Andreas Pfitzmann PETS 2026 Best Student Paper Award will be selected at PETS 2026. Papers written solely or primarily by a student who is presenting the work to PETS 2026 are eligible for the award.

Artifact Award
A winner of the PETS 2026 Artifact Award will be announced at PETS 2026. Artifacts for papers accepted to PETS 2026 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 2026.