Solicited Papers

C&ESAR invites submissions on a broad range of cybersecurity topics, covering:

• All phases of system and operation lifecycles – from requirements elicitation to decommissioning, including legal and regulatory aspects, DevSecOps, operational cyber defense, penetration testing, and influence operations.
• All types of technologies and environments – including socio-economic systems, networks, embedded systems, industrial control systems, IoT, personal devices, cloud, and edge computing.

Paper Types

C&ESAR solicits small (2-4 pages), short (5-9 pages) and regular (10-16 pages) submissions across several dimensions:

• From Research to Practice:

  • Research papers (at least 5, ideally 10 pages): Contributions presenting technical, theoretical, or experimental advancements.
  • Practice papers: Didactic insights on practical knowledge and “lessons learned” of particular interest to C&ESAR’s audience, covering engineering, legal, social, or geopolitical aspects of cybersecurity operations.

• From Topic-Focused to SoK:

  • Topic-Focused papers: Specialized contributions addressing a specific problem, technology, theory, or case study. These papers aim to provide deep-dive technical details or localized solutions to well-defined operational or research challenges.
  • Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) papers (at least 10 pages): Contributions that “evaluate, systematize, and contextualize existing [research or practical] knowledge” (see JSys research SoK description and IEEE S&P research SoK examples).

• From Original to Abstract and Replication:

  • Original papers: Original, unpublished work.
  • Extended abstracts: Summaries of previously published peer-reviewed work (by the same authors of the submission). We specifically welcome reports on the state of the art/practice, surveys, experience reports, and directly applicable solutions to common problems.
  • Replication papers (at least 5 pages): Submissions that replicate, question, or clarify existing published work to validate results or explore their limits in different operational contexts.

• From Mature work to Work in Progress (WiP):

  • Mature work: Submissions presenting consolidated results based on thorough evaluation, extensive field testing, or established theoretical proofs. Evaluations will prioritize technical soundness, completeness, and potential for immediate impact.
  • Work in Progress (WiP): Submissions that introduce promising concepts even if they are incomplete or preliminary. Evaluations will prioritize novelty and relevance over completeness and correctness.

Submission Process

Steps

C&ESAR follows a 3 steps submission process (abstract, proposal, final version). Evaluation and selection is done on the proposal and final version steps. During the proposal step, a selective evaluation is done with a low acceptation rate on a detailed outline of the proposed article (or directly on the final version if a final version is submitted as proposal). During the final version step, an evaluation with a high acceptation rate (high number of articles selected) is done on the final version of the accepted proposals.

1. Step 1: Abstract Registration (Deadline: Wednesday, April 29, 2026):
   Authors must register the title, author names, and abstract via EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cesar2026).
2. Step 2: Proposal Submission (Deadline: Wednesday, May 13, 2026):
   Authors submit a detailed outline (2-6 pages) in PDF format via EasyChair. If desired, at this step, authors can already submit a complete paper (up to 16 pages). However, reviewers will not be required to invest more efforts at this stage than they would for a 6 pages proposal.
   Special requirements:
   • Replication papers must explicitly cite the replicated work.
   • Extended abstracts must explicitly cite the original publications summarized, and provide an appendix containing original reviewer comments if available. If desired, at this stage, authors can submit the PDF of the original article(s) instead of the PDF of a summary.
3. Step 3: Final Version Submission (Deadline: Wednesday, August 19, 2026):
   Authors of preselected papers must submit their final version, which addresses reviewers’ comments, on EasyChair.

Language and Selection Criteria

Language

Papers may be written in French or in English. English translations of the title and abstract are required for submissions in French.

Intended Audience

C&ESAR targets a diverse audience of decision-makers, practitioners, and researchers, in particular:

• Decision-makers seeking:
  • A comprehensive and well-structured overview of cybersecurity challenges and strategic solutions;
• “Technology scouts” of operational units looking to:
  • Benchmark the state of practice (understanding peer strategies and industry standards),
  • Identify mature technologies capable of solving immediate operational problems;
• Engineers and researchers of innovation units interested in:
  • Staying at the forefront of the state of the art within their specialty,
  • Understanding the operational problems faced by others in their community,
  • Identifying promising technologies to be matured that may help solving some of their operational problems;
• Engineers and researchers of research units seeking to:
  • Expand their knowledge of the state of the art in related specialties,
  • Gain exposure to real-world operational problems to ground and direct their research.

Selection Criteria

All submissions are evaluated based on:

• Relevance to C&ESAR’s intended audience;
• Clarity and pedagogical value;
• Adherence to the guidelines and objectives of this call for papers.

Additional criteria:

• Original research papers: Must be original, unpublished, and innovative. Highly specialized papers are welcome if they contribute to explain and analyze the state of the art or practice and their deficiencies.
• Practice papers: Must have a high didactic quality, operational relevance, and accessibility for a broad professional audience.
• SoK papers: Must present a thorough analysis of scientific and industrial literature, accompanied by a clear synthesis that provides new perspectives on the domain.
• Extended abstracts: Must clearly identify and cite the original publication(s). Evaluation is highly selective, emphasizing didactic quality and the ability to bridge complex findings for a broader audience.
• Replication papers: Must clearly identify and cite the replicated work. They must add value (e.g., at the clarity level, by providing a better explanation of the work; at the pedagogical level, by providing additional explanations facilitating the replication; at the scientific level, by exploring the limitations of the original work, or by replicating it in a different setting).

• Work in Progress (WiP): Criteria are adapted to focus on novelty and potential impact for the intended audience of C&ESAR. While these papers may be preliminary or incomplete, they must succeed in exposing the audience to promising and original concepts.

Formatting Instructions

Proposals and papers must be submitted as PDF files, without page numbering, following the single column format of “CEUR Workshop Proceedings” in “emphasizing capitalized style” (https://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html#CEURART).

Templates are available for LaTeX and ODT (LibreOffice, do not use Word): https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/CEURART.zip.

A TeX template configured for C&ESAR 2026 is available on Overleaf at https://www.overleaf.com/read/sbjvkpbypdck#1135d0 (it must be duplicated before edition). A PDF example is available at https://2026.cesar-conference.org/resources/CESAR-2026_template-example.pdf. Submissions not looking like this example will not be considered for inclusion in the official proceedings.

Proceedings and Publication

Authors can opt out of inclusion in any form of proceedings.

As far as possible, since 2021, the official conference proceedings are submitted for publication to “CEUR Workshop Proceedings” (http://ceur-ws.org), facilitating indexing of articles in DBLP and Google Scholar. This publication is conditioned by the respect of this publisher’s constraints (http://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html) and acceptance criteria, in particular respect of its paper format and having a majority of high quality articles written in English.

To increase the probability of acceptance by the publisher and indexing by publication databases such as DBLP, only a curated selection of the most qualitative papers are included in the official conference proceedings. Inclusion decision is at the discretion of the editors of the proceedings and is based, in part, on the following recommendations:

• articles that do not respect the “CEUR Workshop Proceedings” format are not included;
• articles in French are unlikely to be included;
• small papers are not included, while regular papers are more likely to be included than short papers;
• research and SoK papers are more likely to be included than others;
• practice and abstract papers are unlikely to be included, as well as WiP papers to some extent;
• included articles should describe new and innovative work;
• included articles should describe the state of the art, and position the content of the article in this context;
• included articles should contain a number of references and citations in adequation with the volume of publications related to the work described.

Articles accepted for presentation at the conference, but not included in the official conference proceedings (all articles if there are no proceedings published as a volume of “CEUR Workshop Proceedings”), are published on C&ESAR’s websites.

In order to facilitate presentation of work already published elsewhere or intended for publication in another venue, authors can explicitly opt out of inclusion in any form of proceedings.

Important Dates