NDSS Symposium 2025 Call for Artifacts

Call for Artifacts

Before submitting your artifact, please check the information and submission guidelines provided on the Artifact Evaluation website.

Evaluation Process

Authors are invited to submit artifacts soon after receiving the paper notification. At least one contact author must be reachable and respond to questions in a timely manner during the entire evaluation period to allow round trip communications between the AEC and the authors. Artifacts can be submitted only in the AE time frame associated with the paper submission round.

In addition to accepted papers, papers that receive a major or minor revision decision are eligible for AE: at artifact submission time, their authors should justify the necessary changes that they intend to carry out on the initially submitted paper and how such changes relate to the submitted artifact. 

At submission time, authors choose which badges (see below) they want to be evaluated for. Members of the AEC will evaluate each artifact using the artifact appendix and instructions as guides, as detailed later in this page. Evaluators will communicate anonymously with authors through HotCRP to resolve minor issues and ask clarifying questions.

Evaluation starts with a kick-the-tires period during which evaluators ensure they can access their assigned artifacts and perform basic operations such as building and running a minimal working example. Artifact evaluations include feedback about the artifact, giving authors the option to address any significant blocking issues for AE work using this feedback. Communication after the kick-the-tires stage end can address interpretation concerns for the produced results or minor syntactic issues in the submitted materials.

For prospective authors: The target should be to present and document your artifact in a way that AEC members can use it and complete the evaluation successfully with minimal (and ideally no) interaction. To ensure that your instructions are complete, we suggest that you run through them on a fresh setup prior to submission, following exactly the instructions you have provided.

Badges

Authors can request their artifact to be evaluated towards one, two, or all of the following badges:

Available. To earn this badge, the AEC must judge that the artifact associated with the paper has been made available for retrieval permanently and publicly. As an artifact undergoing AE often evolves as a consequence of AEC feedback, authors can use mutable storage for the initial submission, but must commit to uploading their materials to public services (e.g., Zenodo, FigShare, Dryad) for permanent storage backed by a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) if the badge is awarded. The artifact appendix prepared for publication will have to mention the artifact DOI. Authors are welcome to report additional sources, like GitHub and GitLab, that may ease the dissemination of the artifact and possible future updates. Furthermore, for this badge, authors should provide a README file referencing the paper and a LICENSE file for the materials.

Functional. To earn this badge, the AEC must judge that the artifact conforms to the expectations set by the paper for functionality, usability, and relevance. Also, an artifact must be usable on other machines than the authors’, including cases where specialized hardware is required (for example, paths, addresses, and identifiers must not be hardcoded.) The AEC will particularly consider three aspects:

• Documentation: is the artifact sufficiently documented to be exercised by readers of the paper?
• Completeness: does the submitted artifact include all of the key components described in the paper?
• Exercisability: does the submitted artifact include the scripts and data needed to run the experiments described in the paper, and can the software be successfully executed?

Reproduced. To earn this badge, the AEC must judge that they can use the submitted artifact to obtain the main results presented in the paper. In short, is it possible for the AEC to independently repeat the experiments and obtain results that support the main claims made by the paper? The goal of this effort is not to reproduce the results exactly, but instead to generate results independently within an allowed tolerance such that the main claims of the paper are validated. For example, in the case of lengthy experiments, scaled-down versions can be proposed if clearly and convincingly explained for their significance.

Artifact Evaluation Committee

Artifact Evaluation Co-chairs

Daniele Cono D’Elia (Sapienza University of Rome) and Mathy Vanhoef (KU Leuven)

See the list of committee members.