Call For Practitioner Papers
Cybersecurity, at its core, is a very practical field of study. SecDev honors that by asking practitioners to share brief submissions regarding their practical experiences in secure development. Submissions should provide practitioner perspectives and deeper insights into challenges relevant to building, deploying, and maintaining secure systems, and highlight opportunities where constructive security research can promote real-world impact.
(SecDev also seeks posters and tool demos. Information on these solicitations is available on the SecDev website.)
Areas of Interest
From Research to Practice
- Real-world cybersecurity challenges, best practices, case studies, or lessons learned
- Defensive and offensive security approaches to building secure systems
- Success stories from applying secure development practices
- Attacks and countermeasures
Security-Focused System Designs
- AppSec, enterprise security, network security, cloud security
- Securing cyber-physical systems
- Platform, hardware, and embedded systems security
- Securing distributed systems and Internet of Things (IoT)
- Security Frameworks or Architectures
- DevSecOps, SDL, or other secure development processes
- Security engineering processes from requirements to survivability
- Automation of programming, deployment, and maintenance tasks for security
- Risk management, supply chain security
- Programming languages, development tools, and ecosystems enabling security
Security Assurance
- Tools and methodologies for secure development
- Dynamic analysis and runtime approaches (e.g., fuzzing)
- Static code analysis for software and hardware (HDL) security
- Formal verification and other high-assurance methods
- Code reviews, red teams, pentesting, and other human-centered assurance activities
Security for Us
- Privacy by design
- Human-centered design for systems security
Submission Details
Submission site: https://secdev2026-practitioners.hotcrp.com/
Practitioner submissions may be at most two pages, using the two-column proceedings style.
Latex Template: Submissions must use the two-column ACM Proceedings style. It must follow the ACM formatting guidelines, see http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for details. Authors using LaTeX must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble of the document (i.e. \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}).
Submissions will be lightly reviewed and should not be anonymized.
We strongly encourage practitioners from industry and government to submit and share their security experiences, insights, and challenges.
Authors of accepted submissions will be invited to give a short talk during the Practitioners’ Sessions. Submissions will appear in the conference proceedings.
We are devoted to seeking broad representation in the program and may take this into account when reviewing multiple submissions from the same authors.
Any questions, please email: secdev.conference+practitioners@gmail.com
Important Dates (SecDev 2026)
- Paper and tutorial submission deadline: Sunday, March 8th, 2026
- Author notification: Friday, March 20th, 2026
- Camera-ready deadline: Thursday, April 2nd, 2026
- Conference dates: July 5th, 2026 and July 6th, 2026
Important update on ACMs new open access publishing model for 2026 ACM Conferences!
Starting January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access. All ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open Access. Authors will have two primary options for publishing Open Access articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional model or by paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). With over 2,600 institutions already part of ACM Open, the majority of ACM-sponsored conference papers will not require APCs from authors or conferences (currently, around 76%).
Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/policy-on-discretionary-open-access-apc-waivers. Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are granted based on specific criteria set by ACM.
Understanding that this change could present financial challenges, ACM has approved a temporary subsidy for 2026 to ease the transition and allow more time for institutions to join ACM Open. The subsidy will offer:
$250 APC for ACM/SIG members $350 for non-members
This represents a 65% discount, funded directly by ACM. Authors are encouraged to help advocate for their institutions to join ACM Open during this transition period.
This temporary subsidized pricing will apply to all conferences scheduled for 2026.