How the Famed USENIX Security Conf is Managing a Flood of Papers in the AI Era
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
AI usage is evident but isn't yet a serious problem:
The 35th USENIX Security Symposium (USS), which takes place next week in Baltimore, Maryland, hit an all-time high for paper submissions.
While some of that increase has been aided by the availability of AI tools, those managing the conference say abuses were minimal due to defensive measures. But they're also trying not to look too closely in order to preserve trust within the security research community.
"This year's conference has received ~3,030 valid submissions (~1,280 in Cycle 1 and ~1,750 in Cycle 2)," explained Ben Stock, tenured faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and USS program co-chair, in an email to The Register. "This is up from the previous year, which had ~2,400 submissions in total."
Stock said that the entire security community has seen growth of this sortand pointed to the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), which saw its paper submission count jump from 694 in 2024 to 1,311 in 2025 and 1,481 this year.
"So, I would not call the growth unprecedented, even though the number of submissions has reached a high point compared to previous years," he said. "This is something we had expected and scaled our Program Committee (PC) accordingly."
A paper published in April, "More Versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review," found that since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, submission volume at major academic journals has increased 42 percent.
In the USENIX Security '26 transparency report, issued in January between the first and second paper submission cycles, Stock and fellow co-chair Elissa Redmiles, assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University, detail how they've developed tools and policies to account for the possibility of AI usage, both for paper submissions and in paper reviews.
"The proliferation of readily-available LLMs to aid in writing and developing code is not unknown to the community," their report says. "However, we see an alarming trend of AI usage in key areas of the scientific process. Therefore, we took actions against two types of identifiable actions which violate the scientific process in our minds: non-existing (possibly hallucinated) references and usage of AI in the review process."
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.