IEEE Security & Privacy

About IEEE Security & Privacy

IEEE Security & Privacy — Full Journal Profile

IEEE Security & Privacy, shortened throughout the field to S&P or IEEE S&P, is a bimonthly peer-reviewed magazine of the IEEE, published jointly by the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Reliability Society since 2003. It occupies a distinctive place in computer security publishing: it is not a transactions journal of record for archival research papers, and it is not the famous research conference that shares its name, but a magazine written for the whole security community — developers, executives, managers, policy-makers and researchers — whose stated mission is to be the best source of reliable, useful, peer-reviewed information for those aiming to understand how systems, data and people are protected in a world of rapid technology evolution. Its print ISSN is 1540-7993 and its electronic ISSN is 1558-4046. Six issues appear each year, mixing peer-reviewed articles and columns by practitioners and researchers with special issues on targeted topics and on key events in the field.

Two disambiguations matter before anything else, because this title is confused with both of its neighbours more often than almost any other in computing. First, IEEE Security & Privacy the magazine is a different publication from the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, the flagship research conference founded in 1980 and known as “Oakland”; the magazine reports on, and sometimes publishes work connected with, that community, but a magazine article and a symposium paper are different objects with different review processes, and citations to one must never be recorded as citations to the other. Second, the magazine is a magazine: its articles are peer-reviewed and then edited to a magazine standard of clarity and context for a broad technical audience, which is a different promise from the archival completeness expected of IEEE Transactions titles. Readers who keep those two distinctions in view will find the rest of this profile straightforward.

Quick Facts

History and Mission

The magazine began publication in 2003, at a moment when computer security was moving from a specialist concern of systems researchers to a standing problem for every organisation that ran a network. The IEEE Computer Society, which already published practitioner magazines such as Computer and IEEE Software, created in S&P a counterpart devoted to security, privacy and dependability, co-published from the start with the IEEE Reliability Society, whose dependability community shares much of the magazine’s territory. The format it adopted — substantial peer-reviewed articles written to be read, surrounded by departments, columns and interviews — was modelled on the society’s successful magazine tradition and has remained stable for more than two decades of continuous publication, a span the twin Journals World record for this title also reflects in its coverage dates of 2003 to the present.

The mission statement the magazine publishes for itself is worth quoting closely, because it defines what editors look for. S&P’s mission, it says, is to be the best source of reliable, useful, peer-reviewed information for those aiming to understand how systems, data and people are protected in a world of rapid technology evolution. The magazine targets a wide audience of people who understand technology, from developers to executives, managers to policy-makers, and researchers interested in problems with practical impact. Peer-reviewed articles and columns by real-world experts illuminate all aspects of the field, including systems, attacks and defenses, software security, applied cryptography, usability, forensics, big data, ethics and biometrics, with special issues focusing on targeted topics as well as issues devoted to key events and conferences. Every clause of that statement is editorially operative: reliability and usefulness are the tests, practical impact is the filter, and breadth of audience is the reason articles are edited for clarity rather than left in conference-paper form.

Sean Peisert, a computer scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Davis, introduced himself as editor-in-chief in an editorial dated 6 November 2020 after serving the magazine as associate editor, associate editor-in-chief and guest editor, and after chairing the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in 2015 and the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Security and Privacy. His stated ambition was to bring more of the research community’s best work into the magazine’s pages for its practitioner readership. The preceding editor named in reference listings is David M. Nicol. Editorial boards of IEEE magazines rotate on fixed terms, so authors should always confirm the current masthead on the magazine’s own site before relying on any name in a secondary profile, this one included.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The magazine covers security, privacy and dependability of computer-based systems as one connected subject. Within that frame its recurring territories include: the architecture and engineering of secure systems; attacks, defenses and the measurement of both; software security, from vulnerability discovery to secure development practice; applied cryptography as deployed in real protocols and products; usable security and the human factors that decide whether controls work; digital forensics and incident response; security and privacy for large-scale data systems; the ethics of security research and practice; biometrics and identity; and the policy, legal and economic dimensions of security, including the economics of information security, risk management and cyber insurance, and the incentives that shape organisational behaviour. Special issues gather articles around a single theme under guest editors, and calls for those issues specify their topics in detail; regular departments carry shorter, sharper contributions, interviews and commentary from standing columnists.

What the magazine does not publish is equally part of its scope. It is not the venue for a purely theoretical result with no articulated path to practice, for an incremental conference-style paper rewritten in prose, or for product marketing. The bridge between theory and practice is the magazine’s own description of its primary goal, a formulation repeated in library and society descriptions of the title for many years: research articles, case studies, tutorials and regular departments are combined precisely so that a reader who builds, buys, regulates or studies security systems can use what they read. Authors preparing a submission should therefore write the practical consequence of their work into the article itself, in plain language, rather than expecting reviewers and editors to infer it.

Publisher and Ownership — a Correction to the Stored Record

The Journals World record from which this profile was built names the publisher simply as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The fuller, accurate attribution, given in the magazine’s own descriptions, is that IEEE Security & Privacy is co-published by the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Reliability Society, with the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society as technical cosponsors. The distinction matters for authors, because magazine submissions, editorial policy and author services run through the IEEE Computer Society’s magazine operation and its ScholarOne manuscript system, not through a generic IEEE journals channel, and for librarians, because subscriptions and access are administered as a Computer Society magazine delivered through IEEE Xplore. OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint, records the host organisation as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which reflects IEEE-level cataloguing rather than the society-level co-publication the magazine itself states.

Editorial Process and How to Submit

Submissions are handled through the IEEE Computer Society’s peer review system on ScholarOne Manuscripts, the platform the Computer Society uses for its magazines. The society’s published editorial procedure describes the flow that applies to its publications: papers arrive through ScholarOne; the peer review administrator steers each paper through the process; the editor-in-chief makes an initial assessment and assigns an associate editor; associate editors either assign reviewers or administratively reject papers that do not meet the publication’s minimum criteria, giving authors concrete feedback when they do; reviewers are typically given four to six weeks; and the editor-in-chief renders the final decision on the associate editor’s recommendation. Articles accepted for a magazine then pass through a further editorial stage that transactions papers do not face in the same form: professional editing for length, structure and readability for the magazine’s broad audience. Special-issue calls set their own deadlines and length expectations, and historically those calls have asked for articles of at most about 6,000 words with a small reference list, written in a down-to-earth, practical style that does not assume specialised experience in a subfield; authors must always work from the current call or the magazine’s current author guidelines, since limits are set per call and per period.

Practical advice follows from the format. Write the title and opening so that a competent technologist outside your subfield understands the problem; keep mathematics and protocol detail at the level the argument needs and no higher; use figures that carry information rather than decorate; state early what a practitioner should do differently after reading; and respect the reference discipline of a magazine, citing the work a reader genuinely needs rather than a literature survey. Material that has appeared as a research paper can inform a magazine article, but the magazine article must be a new, substantially rewritten piece for its audience, and authors must observe IEEE’s rules on prior publication and disclose related versions at submission.

Indexing and Metrics — Verified Figures, Attributed

The magazine is indexed in Scopus and in the Science Citation Index Expanded, the two listings consistently reported for the title. Its Journal Impact Factor was reported as 3.573 for 2020 in reference listings of the period, and the magazine’s own mission material states its 2024 impact factor as 3.0. OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint to the source record carrying ISSNs 1540-7993 and 1558-4046, recorded at the checking of this profile 3,618 works, 70,769 citations, an h-index of 112 and a two-year mean citedness of about 1.57. The stored template figure for this title’s twin record, an h-index of 95, is an older reading from a different source and date and is superseded by the attributed figures here. Impact factors and citation counts move annually, and OpenAlex counts move as its index changes, so every figure in this paragraph should be re-verified against Journal Citation Reports, Scopus or OpenAlex at the moment a decision depends on it.

Interpretation deserves one caution specific to magazines. A magazine’s citation profile is not directly comparable with that of a research journal or conference: many of its most-read pieces are tutorials, interviews and practice reports that practitioners use without citing, while its research-oriented articles can accumulate citations at rates closer to journal norms. The magazine’s influence is therefore systematically understated by citation counting alone, and its real standing in the field rests as much on its readership among practitioners and policy-makers, and on the standing of its editorial community within the IEEE Computer Society’s security and privacy technical community, as on any single metric.

Access, Fees and Open Access Position

IEEE Security & Privacy is a subscription magazine. Access is principally through IEEE Xplore, individually and through institutional subscriptions, and the magazine also accepts commercial and classified advertising, as its own descriptions note. It is not a fully open access journal: a listing for it in the Directory of Open Access Journals could not be verified from the DOAJ search API output consulted for this profile, and authors should not assume that publication is free of charge in either direction. IEEE magazines operate within IEEE’s general author framework, under which page and open access charges, where they apply to a given publication and article type, are set out in the current IEEE author guidance; those schedules change, and this profile deliberately states no fee figure, because no current fee figure for this magazine could be verified from a fetched official source. Authors with funder open access mandates should confirm the magazine’s current open access option and licence terms with the IEEE Computer Society before submitting.

Similar and Related Publications

The closest internal neighbours are the IEEE Computer Society’s other magazines: Computer, the society’s general practitioner flagship; IEEE Software, for software practice, some of whose security coverage overlaps S&P’s software security territory; and IEEE Internet Computing, for networked systems. Within IEEE’s wider portfolio, the archival counterparts are the security and privacy research venues, including IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing and the newer IEEE Transactions on Privacy, and above all the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy itself, whose proceedings are the research record that the magazine so often interprets for practitioners. Outside IEEE, the comparable practitioner-facing venues are Communications of the ACM and ACM Queue in general computing, and ;login:, the USENIX magazine, in systems practice. A research team choosing between these venues is really choosing an audience: S&P is the choice when the goal is to be read, understood and used by the security profession as a whole.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the magazine’s ISSNs? Print ISSN 1540-7993 and electronic ISSN 1558-4046, the pair recorded for the title in its catalogue and OpenAlex records.

Who publishes IEEE Security & Privacy? It is co-published by the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Reliability Society, with technical cosponsorship from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

Is it the same as the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy? No. The symposium is a research conference; this is a bimonthly magazine. They share a community, a publisher family and a short name, which is why the confusion is constant — but they are different publications with different review processes.

How often does it appear, and since when? Six times a year (bimonthly), continuously since 2003.

Who is the editor-in-chief? Sean Peisert, who introduced himself in the role in an editorial dated November 2020. Magazine mastheads rotate; confirm the current holder on the magazine’s own site.

What is its impact factor? The magazine’s own material states a 2024 impact factor of 3.0; a 2020 figure of 3.573 appears in reference listings. OpenAlex recorded an h-index of 112 at the checking of this profile. Always re-verify current figures in Journal Citation Reports or Scopus.

How do I submit? Through the IEEE Computer Society’s ScholarOne Manuscripts system, following the magazine’s current author guidelines or the specific call for a special issue. Articles are peer-reviewed and then professionally edited for the magazine’s broad audience.

Is it open access? No; it is a subscription magazine delivered through IEEE Xplore. An open access listing in the DOAJ could not be verified for this title, and any open access option should be confirmed with the publisher before submission.

Sources and Verification Notes

This profile was built from the magazine’s own published mission and descriptions, including its co-publication and cosponsorship lines, its topic list, its six-issues-a-year frequency and its stated 2024 impact factor; the IEEE Computer Society’s published editorial procedure for its publications, covering ScholarOne handling, associate-editor assignment, reviewer timelines and final decisions by the editor-in-chief; Sean Peisert’s introductory editorial as editor-in-chief, dated 6 November 2020, for his appointment, background and editorial intentions; society and library descriptions of the magazine for its theory-to-practice purpose; OpenAlex, resolved by ISSN to the matching source record, for citation counts at checking time; and reference listings for the ISO 4 abbreviation, the 2020 impact factor and indexing in Scopus and Science Citation Index Expanded. No fee figure is stated, because no current fee schedule for this magazine could be verified from a fetched source. A second Journals World record for this same magazine exists under the slug ieee-security-and-privacy; it is a thin template record carrying the same two ISSNs, and the pair is reported with this profile as a duplicate pair for merging, with the depth retained on this record.