Ndss writing style

NDSS Writing Style

An NDSS paper is read twice under different pressure. Round 1 decides, from a fast read, whether the paper continues at all — the early reject arrives with no rebuttal for the cut. Round 2 reads closely with your rebuttal in hand. Write the first page for the fast read and the rest for the close one.

The first-page contract

By the end of page one, a Round-1 reviewer should be able to fill in this table from memory:

Question	Your first page must answer it as...
Who attacks?	A capability-bounded adversary: vantage (on/off-path, insider, tenant), budget, access
What breaks / what holds?	The precise property violated or guaranteed, in protocol/system terms
Against what?	Real systems named at the right granularity (protocol version, deployment class)
Why now?	The deployment shift, protocol change, or measurement gap that opens the question
How proven?	The evidence type: end-to-end exploit, testbed defense evaluation, population measurement
Is it handled responsibly?	One sentence signaling disclosure/harm posture, expanded later

The single most common Round-1 kill is an adversary described by adjective ("powerful", "realistic") instead of by capability. Write attackers the way you would write an API contract: what they can call, what they cannot.

Sizing claims

• Bind every claim to the tested envelope: "defeats resolver-side validation as deployed in versions X-Y", never "defeats DNS validation."
• Quantify with populations, not superlatives. "Widespread" is an argument you have not made; "present in N of M sampled deployments, sampled by ⟨method⟩" is one you have.
• Negative space is credibility: a visible limitations paragraph that names the adversary who does beat your defense reads as competence, not weakness, to this PC.
• Never promise what evaluation cannot show — "completely prevents", "provably secure" (without a proof and a model), "first ever" (without a search you can defend).

The ethics thread

NDSS expects ethics to be woven through, not appended: a signal on page one, method-level handling where the risky procedure is described, and the optional Ethics Considerations section immediately before the references (excluded from the 13-page count, per the 2027 CFP, checked 2026-07-08) carrying the full protocol — disclosure timeline, harm analysis, Menlo-style reasoning, review-board interaction. Prose that describes live scanning or user data with no ethical acknowledgment reads to reviewers as a paper that has not understood the venue.

Fitting 13 pages

The 2027 limit is 13 pages excluding the ethics section, references, and appendices, in the NDSS template. Discipline that works:

• Budget pages at outline time: ~1 intro, ~1 background+threat model, ~4-5 design/attack, ~4 evaluation, ~1 related work, ~1 discussion+limitations. Adjust, but on purpose.
• One figure that explains the attack path or architecture is worth a page of prose; a figure that decorates costs a fifth of your evaluation budget.
• Compress with structure, not font tricks — template tampering is a desk-reject class offense at every security flagship, this one included.
• Move proofs, extra configurations, and protocol message details to appendices, but keep every result the acceptance decision depends on inside the body (see ndss-supplementary for the split rules).

Revision drill for an existing draft

PASS 1 (adversary): highlight every sentence that grants or assumes attacker
        capability. They must all appear in the threat model — no capability
        may debut inside the evaluation.
PASS 2 (claims): list every claim sentence; append its evidence pointer
        (§/Fig/Table). Claims with no pointer get weakened or cut.
PASS 3 (vocabulary): replace "secure", "practical", "realistic", "large-scale"
        with the number, version, or bound that justified the word.
PASS 4 (fast read): read only title, abstract, section heads, figure captions,
        and the conclusion in 4 minutes — the Round-1 experience. Does the
        contribution survive? If not, restructure headings, not sentences.
PASS 5 (ethics thread): page-one signal present? method-level handling present?
        ethics section consistent with both?

Tone

Third person or first-person plural, past tense for what was measured, present for what the system does. No exclamation of severity — the exploit speaks for itself or it does not. Double-blind: strip names, funders, internal system codenames, and self-identifying phrases like "our previous work" (cite yourself in third person; details in ndss-submission).

Output format

[First-page contract] 6/6 answered? list the misses
[Claim ledger] N claims, M without evidence pointers → actions
[Adversary discipline] capabilities that debut outside the threat model
[Ethics thread] page-1 signal / method handling / section — present or missing
[Page budget] planned vs actual per section