The society today is increasingly dependent on the correct functioning of computer systems, edge devices and networks for systems and services we use every day, such as aviation, energy production & power grids, intelligent/autonomous vehicles, medical devices & electronic health records, and many others.
The Annual IEEE/IFIP 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 52nd edition in 2022, 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 cyber-attacks, design errors, and unexpected operating conditions. Its distinctive approach to both accidental faults and malicious attacks made DSN the most prestigious international forum for presenting research furthering robustness and resilience of today’s wide spectrum of computing systems and networks.
All aspects of the research and practice of dependability and applied security are within the scope of DSN. Relevant topics include innovative architectures, protocols, and algorithms, for preventing, detecting, recovering, diagnosing or eliminating accidental and malicious threats as well as experimentation with and assessment of dependable and secure systems and networks.
Authors are invited to submit original papers on the current thematic areas of DSN:
Dec. 3, 2021: Abstract submission deadline
Dec. 10, 2021: Paper submission deadline
Jan. 26, 2022: Early reject notification
Feb. 21 - 23, 2022: Author rebuttal period
Mar. 14, 2022: Notification to authors
* All dates refer to AoE time (Anywhere on Earth) *
Innovative papers in other areas of dependable and secure systems and networks will also be considered. Papers will be assessed with criteria appropriate to each category. The conference favors work that explores new territory, continues a significant research dialogue, or reflects on experience with (or measurements of) state-of-the-art implementations. Submissions will be judged on originality, significance, correctness and impact.
Research Papers, Practical Experience Reports, and Tool Descriptions will be refereed and included in the Proceedings of the DSN 2022, 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.
Submissions can be made in one of the following categories (authors are required to indicate the category as part of the paper’s title).
Regular papers (11 pages): full paper describing 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 on this category is expected to show new insights and experiences informing the research and practice of dependability and resilient computing. 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 except the references: title page, text, figures, appendices, etc. 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 reproducibility of their experimental results and encourage authors, whenever possible, to make both the software developed in the experiments or datasets publicly available.
Authors must make a good faith effort to anonymize their paper. As an author, you should not identify yourself in the paper either explicitly or by implication (e.g., through the references or acknowledgments). However, 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 re-written to be about "an anonymous but widely used commercial distributed systems platform."
Additionally, please take the following steps when preparing your submission:
Authors should also avoid broadly advertising their work in a way that reaches the reviewers even if they are not searching for it (for example, presentations in small meetings or seminars are appropriate). It is unacceptable to discuss the work with program committee members or post the work on ArXiV or a similar site just before or while the paper is under evaluation in DSN.
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 disregarded.
Formatting Rules:
Submissions must adhere to the IEEE Computer Society camera-ready 8.5″x11″ 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 2019):
LaTex Package (ZIP)
Word Template (DOC)
Each paper must be submitted as a single Portable Document Format (PDF) file. All fonts must be embedded. 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 success. Please take a note of the following:
Papers are submitted via the submission website: https://dsn2022.hotcrp.com/.
The program committee will perform double-blind reviewing of all submissions, with limited use of 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.
Authors must anonymize their submissions (see Anonymization Rules). Submissions violating the formatting and anonymization rules will be rejected without review. There will be no extensions for reformatting.
DSN attributes a Best Paper Award to one of the accepted scientific papers. The selection of the candidate papers for the award is carried out first by the Program Committee that picks up to six of the accepted papers; then, the Steering Committee chooses among these six papers the three candidate papers to be presented in a special session at the conference; finally, the audience at the conference votes for the paper that should receive the 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.
Note: We would like to inform authors that this year, DSN will adopt an Early Rejection Notification Policy. To save authors time, we decided that the papers that receive three rejection scores in the first round will be notified at the end of the latter instead of remaining stuck in the system until the overall reviewing process is over. As such, authors may get started earlier on improving their manuscript for a future submission.
Authors who do not receive early rejection will have the opportunity to correct, during the rebuttal period, factual inaccuracies in the reviews. After the papers have been reviewed, but prior to the Program Committee meeting, the reviews will be made available to the authors to provide a forum for responding to any factual errors in the reviews. Please note that this is NOT a forum to add any additional information on the paper, to submit an updated or revised paper, or to list changes the authors promise to include in the final version. Author responses will be made available to all PC members before the paper is discussed for selection in the PC meeting.
All accepted papers will be subject to the revision and approval of a PC member acting as shepherd.
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 dependability community and disclose collected data to increase reproducibility and replicability. Note that sharing research data is not mandatory for submission or acceptance.
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 pc_chairs@dsn.org if you have any questions.
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. For other forms of conflict and related questions, authors must explain the perceived conflict to the PC chairs.
Program committee members who have conflicts of interest with a paper, including program co-chairs, will be excluded from any discussion concerning the paper.
To avoid potential bias, the DSN Program Committee Co-Chairs are not allowed to (co-)author any submission to the conference. 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. We should emphasize that the DSN General chairs are not involved in any of the processes related to the technical program including the selection of the PC chairs and PC committee and the submission, reviewing and acceptance of papers.
Program Committee Co-Chairs
Sonia Ben Mokhtar & Peng Liu
pc_chairs@dsn.org