2nd Microarchitecture Security Conference (uASC '26)

Call for Contributions

Important Dates (AoE)

Cycle 1 (Papers only)

In the first cycle we only accept regular paper submissions.

• Cycle 1 Submission Deadline: July 15, 2025
• Cycle 1 Notification to Authors: September 1, 2025
• Cycle 1 Shepherding and Camera-ready Deadline: September 15, 2025

Cycle 2 (Papers, Posters, Talks)

In the second cycle we accept regular paper submissions but also posters and talks.

• Cycle 2 Submission Deadline: November 4, 2025
• Cycle 2 Notification to Authors: December 15, 2025
• Cycle 2 Shepherding and Camera-ready Deadline: January 8, 2026

Papers and Contributions

uASC solicits submissions of high-quality, original scientific papers presenting novel research on microarchitecture security (attacks and defenses). Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Attacks and defenses on various commodity hardware components
• Exploration of (unconventional) threat models in microarchitecture security
• Hardware security analysis techniques
• Microarchitecture security on outdated patch levels, unlikely configurations, and misconfigurations
• Operating system and hypervisor side channels
• Reverse-engineering of microarchitectures for security
• Secure hardware development practices
• Security of hardware-software interfaces
• Systematic insights on the reproducibility of microarchitectural attacks
• Systematic insights on the reproducibility of security and performance claims of microarchitectural defenses
• Systematization of knowledge in microarchitecture security
• Trusted execution environments

uASC offers two types of contributions:

• Papers undergo a thorough double-blind academic review process and are included in the proceedings.
• Talks and Posters are accompanied by an optional two-page abstract and offer a venue for presenting early-stage research, industry insights, or work-in-progress reports.

All accepted papers will be published in the proceedings with Gold Open Access. Paper presentations are allocated about 20 minutes in the program. For talks the presentation time is decided by the program committee. Rejected papers may be invited as a poster or talk with an extended abstract.

Posters

High quality posters enable discussion of recent research results, deep interactions with interested attendees, a peek into ongoing work, and presentation of new crazy ideas. uASC welcomes the submission of posters on preliminary findings, ongoing work, or recently published work. Posters will be presented in a forum where attendees can mingle and interact. Poster submissions may contain an extended abstract of up to two pages in the uASC paper submission format along with a draft of the poster, which will be included in the conference proceedings. If the poster refers to a published paper, it must be referenced. At the conference, we will provide posters stands. Attendees need to bring their printed posters size A0 or A1.

Talks

High quality talks enable discussion of recent open problems from practice and theory, give a peek into ongoing work, or to discuss crazy ideas. uASC welcomes the submission of talks and invites talks to also submit an extended abstract of up to two pages, which will be included in the conference proceedings.

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Submissions

All paper and extended abstract submissions must use the USENIX Security paper template using the official USENIX templates and style files. Visually evident modifications, e.g., reduction of spacing, margins, font sizes, can be a reason for reject.

Papers are expected to have about 10 to 13 pages of content and are limited to a maximum of 13 pages excluding bibliography and well-marked appendices. Reviewers are not required to read appendices. Accepted full papers must fit into 20 pages including bibliography and appendices.

Submission Guidelines

uASC has a double-blind reviewing process for papers. All submitted papers must be appropriately anonymized. Author names and affiliations must be excluded from the paper. Furthermore, authors should avoid obvious self-references, and should cite their own previous work in third person, whenever necessary. Papers that are not properly anonymized risk being rejected without review.

All submitted papers must be original work and may not be under submission to another venue at the time of review. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to physically present the submitted work at the conference, for the paper to be included in the proceedings.

Authors are encouraged to submit code appropriately anonymized, using, e.g., https://anonymous.4open.science/.

All submissions (papers, posters, talks) are done via https://uasc26r1.hotcrp.com/ (Cycle 1) and https://uasc26r2.hotcrp.com/ (Cycle 2).

Poster and talk submissions can be either anonymized or not at the discretion of the authors.

Conflicts of Interest

Conflicts of interest must be declared by authors and PC members. uASC generally considers all cases a conflict of interest where in hindsight an outstanding party might suspect that impartiality was not given. This includes (1) shared affiliations (2) advisor-advisee relations, (3) recent collaborators, (4) individuals involved in mutual funding decisions, or (5) close personal relationships. In case of a conflict of interest with the program chair, the program chair delegates the handling of the paper to the senior program chair (if not conflicted), to a non-conflicted steering committee member, or to a non-conflicted program committee member.

Ethical considerations

Submissions that describe experiments related to vulnerabilities in software or systems should discuss the steps taken to avoid negatively affecting any third-parties (e.g., in case of probing of network devices), and how the authors plan to responsibly disclose the vulnerabilities to the appropriate software or system vendors or owners before publication.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the program chair.