Research Track Call for Contributions

Overview

The Annual IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) is devoted to the mission of ensuring that the computing systems and networks on which society relies are dependable and secure.

DSN, one of the longest-running IEEE conferences, organizing its 57th edition in 2027, has pioneered the fusion between dependability and security research under a common body of knowledge, understanding the need to simultaneously fight against accidental faults, intentional (malicious) attacks, design errors, and unexpected operation conditions. Its distinctive approach to both accidental faults and malicious attacks has made DSN the most prestigious international forum for presenting research that pushes the boundaries in the robustness and resilience of a wide spectrum of computing systems and networks.

All aspects of research and practice of computer system resilience (i.e., dependability and security) are within the scope of DSN. Relevant topics include but are not limited to: 1) innovative systems, architectures, protocols, and algorithms for preventing, detecting, diagnosing, eliminating, or recovering from accidental and malicious threats as well as 2) practical experimentation with and assessment of the dependability and security of all types of computing systems and networks.

Authors are invited to submit original papers on all topics within this broad scope. Example topical areas include but are not limited to the following:

• Hardware (e.g., CPUs/GPUs/DPUs/TPUs, memory systems, systems on chip, I/O devices, storage systems, Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), edge and mobile devices, data center infrastructure, hardware accelerators, emerging technologies, emerging paradigms like processing in memory & quantum computing)
• Software (e.g., applications, middleware, distributed algorithms, operating systems, software security, dependable software design)
• Networked systems and clouds (e.g., wireless networks, mobility, software-defined networking, edge computing, cloud computing/storage, networks on chip, network security)
• Autonomous systems (e.g., self-driving vehicles, autonomous robots, assured autonomy, explainable decision-making, acceptability, privacy issues)
• Cyber-physical systems (e.g., embedded systems, real-time control of critical systems, internet of things, smart grid, automotive, aerospace, railway, medical systems, security and safety of cyber-physical systems)
• Distributed ledgers/Blockchains (e.g., BFT/consensus algorithms, cryptocurrencies, decentralized storage, zero-knowledge proofs, cross-chain protocols)
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for resilient systems (e.g., robust, resilient, secure, and explainable AI/Machine Learning techniques; applications of AI/ML/LLM techniques for dependability and security, robustness issues in AI/ML/LLM systems)
• Agentic AI systems (e.g., dependability and security, verification and certification, alignment and safety, novel attacks, prompt injection and jailbreaking in agentic systems, security and privacy in multi-agent architectures, AI architectures for cybersecurity applications)
• Models and methodologies for programming, evaluating, verifying, and assessing robust (dependable and secure) systems (e.g., performance and dependability evaluation, analytical and numerical methods, simulation, experimentation, benchmarking, verification, field data analysis)
• Emerging technologies and computing paradigms (e.g., robustness, security, dependability issues of emerging memory and storage systems, emerging computing paradigms like agentic systems, quantum computing, processing in memory/sensors/storage/network, 3-dimensional architectures, new hardware/software cooperative paradigms, emerging programming and system paradigms)

Important Dates

Date	Milestone
November 25, 2026	Abstract Submission Deadline
December 2, 2026	Paper Submission Deadline
January 26, 2027	Early Reject Notification
February 12 – 26, 2027	Author Rebuttal & Revision Period
March 18, 2027	Notification to Authors
April 24, 2027	Camera Ready Materials

All dates refer to AoE time (Anywhere on Earth).

Information to Authors

Innovative papers in all areas of dependable and secure systems and networks will be considered. Papers will be assessed with criteria appropriate to each category. The conference broadly and inclusively favors innovative and insightful research that explores new territory, continues a significant research dialogue, or reflects on experience with (or measurements of) state-of-the-art systems. Submissions will be judged on insight, originality, significance, correctness, and potential impact.

Research Papers, Practical Experience Reports, and Tool Descriptions will be refereed and included in the Proceedings of the DSN 2027, if accepted.

All contributions must be written in English. IEEE Computer Society will publish accepted contributions.

At least one author of every accepted paper is expected to register (as a regular registration) for the conference and present the work in person.

Paper Categories

When submitting, authors have to select one of the following categories:

Regular papers (11 pages): a full paper describing a research contribution, including experimental work focused on implementation and evaluation of existing techniques in the DSN thematic areas. Papers should clearly describe a novel scientific contribution and a significant advancement of the state of knowledge in DSN-relevant topics. The paper should address a significant problem with a compelling solution whose validity and practical applicability are clearly discussed.

Practical experience reports (7 pages): a shorter paper describing practitioner experiences or lessons learned applying tools and techniques to real-world problems and systems, or based on the empirical analysis of field data using a rigorous scientific approach. A paper in this category is expected to show new insights and experiences informing the research and practice of robust computing system design. Contributions reporting on industry practical experiences and lessons learned are highly encouraged, including studies reporting negative results or challenges about the practical applicability or scalability of research results in industry.

Tool descriptions/demonstrations (7 pages): descriptions of the architecture, implementation, and usage of substantive tools to aid the research and practice of dependability. A tool paper is expected to describe and demonstrate the value that the tool brings to the dependability community. Making the tool publicly available, whenever possible, is strongly encouraged.

The number of pages indicated above includes everything: title page, text, figures, appendices, etc. Only references are not included in the page limit. Papers that exceed the number of pages for that submission category will be rejected without review.

Independently of the paper category, we expect all papers to provide enough detail to enable the reproducibility of their experimental results and encourage authors, whenever possible, to make both the artifacts and datasets related to the paper publicly available.

Artifacts

DSN supports open science, where authors of accepted papers are encouraged to make their code and datasets publicly available to ensure reproducibility and replicability by other researchers. Therefore, DSN 2027 offers a separate artifact evaluation track that is open to all accepted papers from all three categories of the research track. The goals of the artifact track are to (1) increase confidence in a paper's claims and results, and (2) facilitate future research via publicly available datasets and tools.

At the time of submission, authors must indicate whether they intend to submit an artifact for their submission, and the type of artifact (code, dataset, or both). For more information, see the call for artifacts at dsn.org.

Information about the artifact submission will not be shared with the Research Track PC. The artifact does not need to be submitted at the same time of the paper. The artifacts will be evaluated by a dedicated Artifacts Evaluation (AE) committee through a single-blind review process, where authors should be available to respond quickly during the artifact evaluation. All artifacts submitted will compete for a "Distinguished Artifact Award" to be decided by that committee.

Anonymization Rules

Authors must make a good-faith effort to anonymize their papers for double-blind review. An author should always refer to their own related work in the third person, just like they would refer to any other related work. As an author, you should not identify yourself in the paper either explicitly or by implication (e.g., through references or acknowledgments).

Anonymization should not be done in a way to hurt the review process. For example, omitting published references or anonymizing them for the purposes of a double-blind process can significantly hurt the review process. As such, only non-destructive anonymization is required. For example, system names may be left un-anonymized, if the system name is important for a reviewer to be able to evaluate the work. For example, a paper on experiences with the design of .NET should not be rewritten to be about "an anonymous but widely used distributed systems platform."

Additionally, please take the following steps when preparing your submission:

• Remove authors' names and affiliations from the title page.
• Remove acknowledgment of identifying names and funding sources.
• Use care in naming your files. Source file names, e.g., Joe.Smith.dvi, are often embedded in the final output as readily accessible comments. Avoid names that could in any way be interpreted as being derived from the name of an author or identifying an author's location or affiliation.
• Use care in referring to related work, particularly your own previously published work. Do not omit references to provide anonymity, as this leaves the reviewer unable to grasp the context. Instead, a good solution is to reference your past work in the third person, just as you would any other piece of related work.
• If you have a concurrent submission, reference it as follows: "Closely related work describes a microkernel implementation [Anonymous 2025]." with the corresponding citation: "[Anonymous 2025] Under submission. Details omitted for double-blind reviewing." This is, for example, the case for extended versions of the paper available online.
• If you cite anonymous work, you must also send the deanonymized reference(s) to the PC chair in a separate email.

Authors should also avoid broadly advertising their work in a way that reaches the reviewers even if they are not searching for it (presentations in small meetings or seminars are allowed). It is unacceptable to discuss the work with program committee members. Posting the work on ArXiV or a similar site is within the authors' rights; however, the authors should use a different title than the submission and they should avoid specifying that the work is under submission to DSN. In particular, please ensure that there are not old versions of the paper on ArXiV that have the same title as the submission.

Submissions that do not conform to the above submission deadline, anonymization, and formatting guidelines (e.g., are too long, use fonts or line spacing smaller than what is indicated) or are unoriginal, previously published, or under submission to multiple venues, will be desk rejected without reviews.

Formatting Rules

Submissions must adhere to the IEEE Computer Society 8.5″×11″ two-column camera-ready format (using a 10-point font on 12-point single-spaced leading) as implemented by the LaTeX/Word templates available at the IEEE conference template page (last updated in 2024):

• LaTeX Package (ZIP)
• Word Template (DOCX)

Each paper must be submitted as a single Portable Document Format (PDF) file. All fonts must be embedded in the file. We also strongly recommend you print the file and review it for integrity (fonts, symbols, equations, etc.) before submitting it. A defective printing of your paper can undermine its chance of acceptance. Please take a note of the following:

• The first page must include the title of the paper, the type of the paper (Regular / Practical Experience / Tool), and a maximum 150-word abstract.
• Please take into account that the abstract will be used by the reviewers to bid on papers: describe the paper goals clearly, as well as the means used to achieve them. If the title and abstract are not sufficiently descriptive at the time of the abstract deadline, the submission may be rejected without review.
• The title and authors CAN NOT be changed after the abstract deadline.
• The first page is not a separate page, but is a part of the paper (and thus has technical material in it). Thus, this page counts toward the total page budget for the paper.
• There is no page limit for references — however, authors must not put any text or figures on the pages for the references — if so, those pages will be included in the page limits above.
• The use of color for figures and graphs is encouraged, but the paper should be easily readable if printed in grayscale.
• Symbols and labels used in the graphs should be readable as printed, without requiring on-screen magnification.
• Try to limit the file size to less than 15 MB.

Paper Submissions

Papers are submitted via the submission website: https://dsn27.hotcrp.com.

The program committee will perform a double-blind review of all submissions, with help from outside referees. Papers will be held in full confidence during the reviewing process, but papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms are not acceptable and will be rejected without review.

Submissions violating the formatting and anonymization rules will be rejected without review. There will be no extensions for reformatting.

Awards

DSN gives three Best Paper Awards and one of them, based on the quality of the oral presentation, will also receive a Distinguished Best Paper Award. All of them will be presented in a special Best Paper Session at the conference.

The selection of the candidate papers for the awards is carried out as a three-step process. First, the Program Committee picks 6–7 of the accepted papers based on the review and revision process & committee discussion. Second, the Steering Committee (in consultation with the Program Chairs) chooses among these papers the 3 Best Papers that are to be presented in the Best Paper Session at the conference (all these papers receive the Best Paper Award). Third, and finally, the audience at the conference votes among these Best Papers to select the one that should receive the Distinguished Best Paper Award.

DSN also attributes a group of awards based on nominations. These awards are the William C. Carter Ph.D. Dissertation Award in Dependability, the Rising Star in Dependability Award, the Test-of-Time Award, and the Jean-Claude Laprie Award. Please check the relevant page on the DSN website for additional details.

As noted above, there will also be a Distinguished Artifact Award.

Review Process and Author Response

This year, as initiated in DSN 2023, in addition to the rebuttal process, DSN is following a Paper Revision Process. For papers that are not early rejects, the authors will be invited to submit a revised paper (as well as a rebuttal) after receiving their reviews. The major goal of the revision process is twofold:

1. to strengthen the papers by making sure reviewer comments are properly addressed in a revised version; and
2. to enable the reviewers to see how their comments, in particular their high priority concerns, are addressed in a revised version (which is especially useful in cases where rebuttal may not have the same effect).

Through this process, we give the authors the ability to submit both a revised paper (based on the received reviews) and a rebuttal. These two serve different purposes. In particular, the rebuttal remains useful for at least three purposes that cannot be easily accomplished with a revised paper:

1. to clarify misunderstandings (and point out any other issues) in the reviews;
2. to describe a plan for revisions the author would like to make but need more time for than the revision time frame allows; and
3. to provide a summary of changes that helps the authors to describe how they addressed the reviewer comments in the revised paper.

The authors of all papers that are invited for revision will be allowed one extra page to properly address reviewer comments. In other words, the revised (and, if accepted, the final) versions of papers will be allowed 12 pages for regular papers and 8 pages for practical experience reports or tool descriptions/demonstrations. The authors will be asked to mark and describe all the changes they made to the submission during the revision process. More information will be provided to authors of papers who are asked to provide a revision as to how to prepare, format, and submit the revised version of the submission. Note that submitting a revised paper does not guarantee acceptance of the paper to the conference and all revised papers will be reviewed and discussed by the Program Committee.

To limit the load on the reviewers, the rebuttal will be strictly limited to 750 words and the revised version should be strictly limited to addressing the reviews and do not include more than 30% new content. Any extra information, including images or links to additional material in the rebuttal, will be discarded.

DSN will continue to employ the Early Rejection Notification Policy. Papers that are rejected in the first reviewing round will receive their rejection notification and reviews by January 26, 2027. As such, the authors may get started earlier on improving their manuscript for a future submission, if they wish to do so.

All accepted papers will be subject to the revision and approval of a PC member acting as a shepherd.

Withdrawal Policy

A paper can be withdrawn at any point before the reviews have been sent to the authors. Once the reviews have been sent to the authors, the paper CAN NOT be withdrawn.

Open Science Policy

After papers are accepted, the authors are encouraged to make all research results accessible to the public and ensure, if possible, that empirical studies are reproducible. In particular, DSN actively supports the adoption of open source and open data principles and encourages all authors to make their prototypes available to the research community and disclose collected data to increase reproducibility and replicability. Note that sharing research data is not mandatory for submission or acceptance. Accepted papers can participate in the artifact evaluation process described above.

Ethical Considerations

Submissions describing experiments with data derived from human subjects or presenting results that might have ethical considerations should discuss how ethical and potential legal concerns were addressed and disclose if an ethics review was conducted (e.g. by the author's institutional ethics review boards if applicable). Also, if the paper reports a potentially high-impact vulnerability, the authors should discuss the steps they have taken or plan to address these vulnerabilities (e.g., by contacting the vendors/manufacturers). The same applies if the submission deals with personal identifiable information or other kinds of sensitive data (e.g., by following applicable privacy protection regulations and rules). The PC's review process may examine the ethical soundness of the paper just as it examines the technical soundness. The Program Committee reserves the right to reject a submission if insufficient evidence was presented that significant ethical or relevant legal concerns were appropriately addressed.

Contact the program co-chairs research_track@dsn.org if you have any questions.

Policy on Ethical Use of AI Tools

The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) adheres to the IEEE Principles of Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence in Publishing (https://pspb.ieee.org/images/files/PSPB/opsmanual.pdf). All authors and reviewers must abide by the following guidelines:

• Author Responsibility & Accuracy: Authors bear full responsibility for all content. Any material produced by an AI tool (text, code, figures, etc.) must be strictly verified for accuracy and checked for plagiarism prior to submission. Authors must verify that AI-generated content does not reproduce copyrighted or unattributed material and that all references are valid and verifiable.
• Mandatory Disclosure: Any intellectual content generated by an AI tool must be explicitly disclosed in a section called "AI Tool Usage", which is limited to 1–2 paragraphs, does NOT count toward the submission page limit and is placed after the Acknowledgements section. This section must:
  • Disclose the AI system used (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot).
  • Specify which sections, figures, or code utilize AI-generated content and explain the extent of its use.
• Language Editing Exemption: Using AI solely to improve grammar or readability without altering the meaning or adding new intellectual content does not require formal disclosure, though it is recommended.
• Simulated Data & Reproducibility: Data generated by an AI tool to simulate a process must be explicitly labeled as AI-generated. When AI tools materially influence results, authors should provide sufficient detail (e.g., model version, prompts, parameters) to enable reproducibility. If an AI tool is the primary subject of the article, authors are strongly encouraged to make the source code and curated data publicly available.
• Confidentiality Requirements for Reviewers: Reviewers and TPC members must not upload submitted manuscripts into unauthorized or public AI tools (e.g., web-based LLMs) to generate reviews. Doing so violates IEEE peer-review confidentiality policies.
• Reporting Violations: Perceived violations should be reported to the DSN Program Committee Chairs research_track@dsn.org, who may escalate the matter to IEEE. Violations can result in investigation, paper rejection, or other sanctions (e.g., submission ban for all the authors) at the discretion of the PC chairs.

Example Disclosure for Authors: "We used [AI Tool Name] to generate boilerplate code for the experimental setup in Section 3 and to draft the initial threat model in Section 4, which the authors subsequently revised and verified. AI-generated data in Figure 2 is explicitly labeled."

Conflicts of Interest

Authors and PC members are asked to declare potential conflicts during the paper submission and reviewing process. In particular, a conflict of interest must be declared under any of the following conditions: (1) anyone who shares an institutional affiliation with an author at the time of submission, (2) anyone the author has collaborated or published within the last two years, (3) anyone who was the advisor or advisee of an author, or (4) is a relative or close personal friend of the authors. Note that adding spurious conflicts just to exclude certain PC members will be grounds for desk rejection. For other forms of conflict and related questions, authors must explain the perceived conflict to the PC chairs.

PC members who have conflicts of interest with a paper, including the PC Co-Chairs and the Associate Chairs, will be excluded from any evaluation and discussion of that paper.

Submission Policy for Chairs and Organizers

To avoid potential bias, the two DSN Program Committee Co-Chairs are not allowed to (co-)author any submission to the conference. On the contrary, there are no such restrictions for the PC members and other organizing committee members, including the General chairs, since double-blind anonymization rules and conflict of interest declaration and resolution procedures are enforced.

Program Committee Co-Chairs

Homa Alemzadeh, University of Virginia
Rüdiger Kapitza, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

Contact

For further information please send an email to research_track@dsn.org.