C&ESAR 2025: 32nd Computer & Electronics Security Application Rendezvous Couvent des Jacobins Rennes, France, November 19-20, 2025

Conference website	https://2025.cesar-conference.org/
Submission link	https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cesar2025
Abstract registration deadline	April 30, 2025
Submission deadline	May 14, 2025

About C&ESAR

Since 1997, the French Ministry of Defense has organized C&ESAR, an annual cybersecurity conference that has become a key event within the European Cyber Week (ECW). Held every fall in Rennes, Brittany, France, C&ESAR serves as an important forum for cybersecurity professionals, researchers, and decision-makers.

The conference brings together experts from government, industry, and academia, fostering a unique interdisciplinary exchange. It provides operational practitioners with insights into emerging technologies, while industry and research communities gain exposure to real-world challenges. This synergy helps shape the future of cybersecurity by bridging the gap between theoretical advancements and practical implementation.

The detailed call for papers is available online on a dedicated web page presenting the call.

Solicited Papers

C&ESAR invites submissions on a broad range of cybersecurity topics, covering:

• All phases of the system lifecycle – from requirements elicitation to decommissioning, including legal and regulatory aspects, DevSecOps, operational cyber defense, penetration testing, and disinformation.
• All types of technologies and environments – including socio-economic systems, networks, embedded systems, industrial control systems, IoT, personal devices, cloud, and edge computing.

Paper Categories

C&ESAR solicits submissions in the following categories:

• Scholarly papers:
  • Regular papers (10-16 pages) and short papers (5-9 pages): Original, unpublished research conducted by the authors.
  • Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) papers (10-16 pages): “Evaluate, systematize, and contextualize existing knowledge” (SoK papers description available at https://www.jsys.org/type_SoK/; examples available at https://oaklandsok.github.io/);
  • Extended abstracts (2-16 pages): Summarize previously published peer-reviewed journal or conference papers (by the same authors). Topics of special interest include reports on the state of the art or practice, surveys, experience reports, and directly applicable solutions to common problems.
• Professional/Trade papers:
  • Replication papers (5-16 pages): Replicate, question and clarify existing published research.
  • Practice papers (2-16 pages): Didactic practical insights into cybersecurity of special interest for C&ESAR’s audience, including engineering, legal, social, or geopolitical aspects.

In addition, C&ESAR distinguishes between papers describing mature work and Work in Progress (WiP). C&ESAR accepts both types of papers. WiP papers should introduce promising concepts even if they are incomplete or preliminary. Evaluations will prioritize novelty and relevance over completeness and correctness.

Submission Process

Steps

C&ESAR follows a 3 steps submission process (abstract, proposal, final version). Evaluation and selection is done on the proposal and final version steps. During the proposal step, a selective evaluation is done with a low acceptation rate on a detailed outline of the proposed article (or directly on the final version if a final version is submitted as proposal). During the final version step, an evaluation with a high acceptation rate (high number of articles selected) is done on the final version of the accepted proposals.

1. Step 1: Abstract Registration (Deadline: Wednesday, April 30, 2025):Authors must register the title, author names, and abstract via EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cesar2025).
2. Step 2: Proposal Submission (Deadline: Wednesday, May 14, 2025):Authors submit a detailed outline (2-6 pages) in PDF format via EasyChair. If desired, at this step, authors can already submit a complete paper (up to 16 pages). However, reviewers will not be required to invest more efforts at this stage than they would for a 6 pages proposal.Identification requirements:
   • SoK papers must include “(SoK)” in the title.
   • Practice papers must include “(practice)” in their title.
   • Replication papers must include “(replication)” in the title and explicitly cite the replicated work.
   • Extended abstracts must include “(extended abstract)” in the title, explicitly cite the original publications summarized, and provide an appendix containing original reviewer comments if available. If desired, at this stage, authors can submit the PDF of the original article(s) instead of the PDF of a summary.
   • Papers to be considered Work in Progress (WiP) must include “(WiP)” in their title.
3. Step 3: Final Version Submission (Deadline: Wednesday, August 27, 2025):Authors of preselected papers must submit their final version, which addresses reviewers’ comments, on EasyChair.

Language and Selection Criteria

Language

Papers may be written in French or in English. English translations of the title and abstract are required for French submissions.

Intended Audience

C&ESAR targets a diverse audience of decision-makers, practitioners, and researchers, in particular:

• Decision makers interested in:
  • broad and well constructed overview of cybersecurity challenges and solutions;
• “Technology scouts” of operational units interested in:
  • knowing more about the state of practice (what others in the same domain do),
  • identifying recent mature technologies that may help solving some of their operational problems;
• Engineers and researchers of innovation units interested in:
  • knowing more about the state of the art in their specialty,
  • knowing more about the operational problems addressed by others in their community,
  • identifying recent to be matured technologies that may help solving some of their operational problems;
• Engineers and researchers of research units interested in:
  • knowing more about the state of the art in specialties related to their own,
  • identifying operational problems related to their research specialties.

Selection Criteria

All papers are evaluated based on:

• relevance to C&ESAR’s intended audience;
• clarity and pedagogical value;
• adherence to this call for papers.

Additional criteria:

• Regular & Short Papers must be original, unpublished, and innovative. Highly specialized technical papers will be appreciated if they contribute to explain and analyze the state of the art or practice and their deficiencies.
• SoK Papers must present a thorough analysis of scientific and industrial literature; and a synthesis must accompany this analysis.
• Extended Abstracts must clearly identify and cite the original publications. Their evaluation is more selective, and emphasizes the didactical quality and large audience of the papers.
• Replication Papers must clearly identify and cite the replicated work. They must add value to the replicated work (e.g., at the clarity level, by providing a better explanation of the work; at the pedagogical level, by providing additional explanations facilitating the replication; at the scientific level, by exploring the limitations of the original work, or by replicating it in a different setting).
• Practice Papers evaluation emphasizes their didactical quality and large audience accessibility.
• For papers identified as WiP, the above criteria are adapted to focus on the novelty and impact potential for the intended audience of C&ESAR. WiP papers are assumed less mature than other papers. They may present work that are incomplete or incorrect in some aspects, but will still expose C&ESAR’s audience to interesting and novel ideas and concepts.

Formatting Instructions

Proposals and papers must be submitted as PDF files, without page numbering, following the single column format of “CEUR Workshop Proceedings” in “emphasizing capitalized style” (https://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html#CEURART).

Templates are available for LaTeX and ODT (Word or LibreOffice): https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/CEURART.zip.

A TeX template configured for C&ESAR 2025 is available on Overleaf at https://www.overleaf.com/read/bcbnprrtjqtn#768392 (it must be duplicated before edition). A PDF example is available at https://2025.cesar-conference.org/resources/CESAR-2025_template-example.pdf. Submissions not looking like this example will not be considered for inclusion in the official proceedings.

Proceedings and Publication

Authors can opt out of inclusion in any form of proceedings.

As far as possible, since 2021, the official conference proceedings are submitted for publication to “CEUR Workshop Proceedings” (http://ceur-ws.org), facilitating indexing of articles in DBLP and Google Scholar. This publication is conditioned by the respect of this publisher’s constraints (http://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html) and acceptance criteria, in particular respect of its paper format and having a majority of high quality articles written in English.

To increase the probability of acceptance by the publisher and indexing by publication databases such as DBLP, only a curated selection of the most qualitative papers are included in the official conference proceedings. Inclusion decision is at the discretion of the editors of the proceedings and is based, in part, on the following recommendations:

• articles that do not respect the “CEUR Workshop Proceedings” format are not included;
• articles in French are unlikely to be included;
• regular and SoK papers are more likely to be included than short and replication papers;
• practice and abstract papers are unlikely to be included, as well as WiP papers to some extent;
• included articles should describe new and innovative work;
• included articles should describe the state of the art, and position the content of the article in this context;
• included articles should contain a number of references and citations in adequation with the volume of publications related to the work described.

Articles accepted for presentation at the conference, but not included in the official conference proceedings (all articles if there are no proceedings published as a volume of “CEUR Workshop Proceedings”), are published on C&ESAR’s websites.

In order to facilitate presentation of work already published elsewhere or intended for publication in another venue, authors can explicitly opt out of inclusion in any form of proceedings.

Important Dates

Milestone	Deadline
Proposal registration	Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Proposal submission	Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Notification of preselection	Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Final version submission	Wednesday, August 27, 2025
Notification of acceptance	Wednesday, September 24, 2025
European Cyber Week (ECW)	Tuesday, November 18, 2025 to Thursday, November 20, 2025

Program board

• José Araujo (SNCF)
• Eric Aubourg (CEA)
• Frédéric Cuppens (Polytechnique Montréal)
• Guillaume Doyen (IMT Atlantique)
• Ivan Fontarensky (Thales)
• Jacques Fournier (ST Microelectronics)
• Julien Francq (Naval Group)
• Brittia Guiriec (DGA MI)
• Gurvan Le Guernic (DGA MI, Université de Rennes)
• Frédéric Majorczyk (DGA MI, CentraleSupélec)
• Guillaume Meier (Airbus R&D)
• Patricia Mouy (CEA)
• Vivien Mura (Orange Cyberdéfense)
• Laurence Ogor (DGA MI)
• Marc-Oliver Pahl (IMT Atlantique, Chaire Cyber CNI)
• Yves-Alexis Perez (ANSSI)
• Ludovic Pietre-Cambacedes (EDF)
• Tania Richmond (Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie)
• Louis Rilling (DGA MI)
• Eric Wiatrowski
• Olivier Zendra (Inria)