AI and ML

AI usage is evident but isn't yet a serious problem

The 35th USENIX Security Symposium (USS), which takes place next week in Baltimore, Maryland, hit an all-time high for paper submissions.

While some of that increase has been aided by the availability of AI tools, those managing the conference say abuses were minimal due to defensive measures. But they're also trying not to look too closely in order to preserve trust within the security research community. 

"This year's conference has received ~3,030 valid submissions (~1,280 in Cycle 1 and ~1,750 in Cycle 2)," explained Ben Stock, tenured faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and USS program co-chair, in an email to The Register. "This is up from the previous year, which had ~2,400 submissions in total."

Stock said that the entire security community has seen growth of this sort and  pointed to the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS),  which saw its paper submission count jump from 694 in 2024 to 1,311 in 2025 and 1,481 this year.

"So, I would not call the growth unprecedented, even though the number of submissions has reached a high point compared to previous years," he said. "This is something we had expected and scaled our Program Committee (PC) accordingly."

Sussing out unacceptable uses of AI

A paper published in April, "More Versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review," found that since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, submission volume at major academic journals has increased 42 percent.

In the USENIX Security '26 transparency report, issued in January between the first and second paper submission cycles, Stock and fellow co-chair Elissa Redmiles, assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University, detail how they've developed tools and policies to account for the possibility of AI usage, both for paper submissions and in paper reviews.

"The proliferation of readily-available LLMs to aid in writing and developing code is not unknown to the community," their report says. "However, we see an alarming trend of AI usage in key areas of the scientific process. Therefore, we took actions against two types of identifiable actions which violate the scientific process in our minds: non-existing (possibly hallucinated) references and usage of AI in the review process."

After identifying and rejecting a paper that contained nonexistent references, the report explains, the conference organizers developed tooling "to extract references from the submitted PDFs, query well-known sources such as DBLP and arXiv, and manually confirm invalid references."

The org rejected papers containing three or more hallucinated references, a policy that impacted 21 of the 1,181 first round submissions (1.78 percent).

"We have rejected papers for the repeated presence of nonexistent references," said Stock. "We cannot say with certainty that these were AI-hallucinated, but nevertheless considered these papers to be problematic and thus rejected them."

The report notes that more than 100 additional papers contained at least one reference that reviewers could not confirm. Aware that some of these might simply be false positives due to name spelling differences or missing citations, conference officials opted not to investigate these in order not to further burden staff.

Conference organizers draw the line at using AI for bibliography preparation. "We believe that it is critical to halt this trend that threatens scientific integrity before it grows further," the report states.

However, limited use of AI to polish human-written text is expected, and that extends to those reviewing submitted papers, up to a point.

"We have not set a dedicated AI policy, but have made it clear to our PC members that usage of [AI] services to write reviews is not permitted, in particular also because this violates confidentiality," said Stock.

"We have detected a tiny number of cases where we have reached sufficient confidence that AI was used and took appropriate actions, including removal of the members from the PC and allowing affected authors to resubmit."

Under that policy, USS asked five of 496 reviewers to cease participation.

"We have not seen evidence that leads us to believe that AI generated submissions have become a significant challenge for the security community," said Stock. "This does not mean that AI hasn't been used in parts of these submissions, though." ®