This page collects answers to frequently asked questions about CCS 2017 submissions. Our intent is to make the answers public so it is clear what they are to any submitter, as well as to reviewers.
E1. Can I have an extension?
No.
E2. My fingers are broken from rescuing a suffering dog from a building that collapsed in a local earthquake, so I'm not able to finish my paper before the deadline. Can I please have an extension?
Sorry, but no. We hope you recover soon and appreciate you saving the poodle, but for a conference like this, there is no fair way to grant extensions to anyone, no matter how dire your circumstances are or how deserving of one you might be.
C1. My paper describes some security flaws in products by BigCo, Inc. Should I mark PC members from BigCo as conflicts?
No. We believe this is not a conflict that would prevent an unbiased review, and as the PC Chairs, we will be aware of the issue in interpreting reviews.
A1. Can I post my paper on arxiv?
Yes, you are welcome to post your paper in non-anonymized form on arxiv or other public paper distribution sites. The anonymity policy is not meant to thwart rapid dissemination of research results or to hamper your ability to communicate about your work. It is intended to make it so a well-intentioned reviewer who is not already aware of your work will be able to review the paper without learning your identity. It is not intended to prevent an adversarial reviewer from being able to discover your identiy (for example, by doing searches on the paper title, or using stylometric analysis on a corpus of authors of research papers).
A2. My paper is about work I presented at a non-paper conference (like Blackhat or DEFCON). Can I submit to CCS, and how should I reference the previous conference talk?
Yes, you are welcome to submit work that has not been previously published to CCS, and presenting at a conference without proceedings does not count as previous publication. To avoid concerns about reviewers thinking the work is not original because of knowledge of the presentation, you should cite the presentation and make it clear in your text that it was your work. The reference should be anonymized to prevent accidental author disclosure. For example, the reference should be [#] Authors removed for anonymity. [talk title], conference information.
A3. I want to provide a supplemental website with code/data associated with my paper. Is this allowed?
Yes, you can include a URL in your paper that points to a site with supplemental material. It is important that the URL does not violate anonmity requirements, so it should not be your institution's domain or something that would reveal your identity. For most material, the best solution is to create a new, pseudonymous account with a cloud service (e.g., github, bitbucket, or google sites) where you can post your content at a URL that will not disclose your identity. Keep in mind that reviewers are not expected to evaluate anything other than the (up to 12 pages) body of the paper. The material posted on the site should either be anonymized, or if it is not possible to do that, there should be a warning next to the URL in the paper that the content linked is not anonymized. Any attempt to use supplemental materials to identify or harm reviewers is considered a serious breach of ethics and will be dealt with as harshly as possible.
A4. My paper is about a system that reviewers may have heard about and will know is mine. Should I change the name of the system in the paper?
No, it is not necessary or encouraged to change the name of your system for the submission. If a reviewer is already familiar with the system, changes its name will not prevent them from guessing who wrote the paper, but will leave them confused. A reviewer not familiar with the work could, of course, do a DuckDuckGo/Bing/Google search to find your system. The goal of anonymization is to make it so reviewers who do not want to know the authors of a paper will not accidentally discover them, not to prevent "adversarial" reviewers from being able to learn the identity of authors if they really want to.