/ccs-review-process

name: ccs-review-process
description: Use when explaining or planning around ACM CCS peer review, the two-cycle HotCRP workflow, decision categories including minor revision, the rebuttal window, the adversarial reviewer pool, ethics and disclosure scrutiny, meta-review dynamics, and ACM proceedings outcomes.

CCS Review Process

Use this to reason about review-stage strategy. Reopen the current CFP, the cycle's HotCRP site, the reviewer guidelines if posted, and the ethics policy before making process claims.

Process model

• CCS runs two review cycles per year on HotCRP, each with abstract registration, full-paper

submission, review, a rebuttal window, and notification.

• Reviewers assess threat-model soundness, novelty, technical correctness, evidence quality,

ethics and responsible disclosure, and significance to the security community.

• Decisions are not binary: CCS 2026 used accept, minor revision (authors revise for the same

cycle under a shepherd or check), and reject. A first-cycle reject cannot return that year.

• An ethics or disclosure concern can sink an otherwise strong paper; the ethics reviewer's

view carries weight independent of technical scores.

• Accepted papers publish in the ACM Digital Library proceedings, so camera-ready and metadata

compliance matter as much as the initial decision.

Who reviews here

• The pool is adversarial by training: expect at least one reviewer to attack your threat

model, look for the assumption that makes the attack easy, and probe whether the defense was tested against an adaptive attacker.

• CCS is broad, so a paper may draw reviewers from an adjacent sub-area; the threat model and

intro must orient a web-security reviewer to a crypto result and vice versa.

• Borderline papers usually fall on one of three edges: an attacker assumption too strong to

be interesting, a defense never adapted against, or an ethics gap left unaddressed.

Scoring leverage table

| Review dimension | What raises it | What sinks it | |---|---|---| | Threat model | A tight, realistic adversary stated up front | Capabilities that quietly grow to make the attack work | | Novelty | An attack class or guarantee the literature lacked | An increment over a cited paper with no new idea | | Evidence | End-to-end demonstration against a real target | Lab-only results against a strawman | | Ethics | Disclosure done, harm minimized, reasoned in the paper | Real-world harm with no disclosure or IRB reasoning |

Stage-by-stage realism

• Initial reviews: triage by what the meta-reviewer will weigh — threat model and evidence —

not by reviewer tone.

• Rebuttal: the window is short and structured; one crisp answer to the decision-critical

objection beats an exhaustive point-by-point.

• Decision: the meta-review synthesizes; one unresolved threat-model or ethics objection

outweighs several resolved clarity complaints.

• Minor revision: treat it as conditional acceptance with a checklist, not a debate; do

exactly what the shepherd asks within the cycle's timeline.

Output format

[Current stage] submitted / reviews / rebuttal / decision / revision / camera-ready
[Decision actors] <reviewers / ethics reviewer / meta-reviewer / chairs>
[Likely leverage] <threat model / novelty / evidence / ethics>
[Forbidden moves] <identity leak / new unsupported results / ignoring the shepherd>
[Next response move] <one action>