ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security

ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security
Title	ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security
Abbreviation	ACM Trans. Priv. Secur.
Discipline	Computer science
Editor	Michael Clarkson
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
Country	United States
History	1998–present
Frequency	Quarterly
Issn	2471-2566

ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Association for Computing Machinery focusing on research at the intersection of cryptography, computer security and privacy law. It aims to bridge theoretical foundations and practical systems by publishing original research, surveys, and case studies relevant to researchers and practitioners affiliated with institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Cambridge. Contributors and readers often include members of projects and organizations like Internet Engineering Task Force, Electronic Frontier Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Microsoft Research, and Google Research.

Overview

ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security publishes research on cryptographic protocols, access control, anonymous communication, and data protection mechanisms, engaging communities around RSA Conference, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Usenix Security Symposium, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, and Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium. Typical articles intersect themes from influential works and authors associated with Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman, Whitfield Diffie, and Martin Hellman, and build upon standards and directives such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, General Data Protection Regulation, and standards from International Organization for Standardization. The journal connects to research programs at laboratories like Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, IBM Research, and universities linked to the Alan Turing Institute.

History and Development

The journal emerged from a lineage of ACM publications and conferences in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, tracing intellectual roots to foundational events like the RSA Conference and milestones involving figures from Bell Labs and AT&T Laboratories. Its development paralleled policy and technical shifts prompted by incidents and legislation involving organizations such as National Aeronautics and Space Administration, United States Department of Defense, European Commission, and responses to breaches that affected institutions like Sony Corporation and Yahoo!. Editorial evolution reflected the influence of scholars associated with Princeton University, Harvard University, Cornell University, University of Oxford, and ETH Zurich, and engagement with funding agencies including the National Science Foundation and the European Research Council.

Scope and Topics

The journal covers formal methods for privacy, cryptographic primitives, usable security, and policy-aware systems, drawing on prior literature connected to scholars such as Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, Oded Goldreich, Dana Angluin, and Cynthia Dwork. Topic areas intersect technical and institutional actors like Internet Society, World Wide Web Consortium, Council of Europe, and research projects at MIT CSAIL and Stanford Computer Security Lab. Specific themes include secure multiparty computation influenced by work from Yehuda Lindell and Tal Rabin, differential privacy following Dwork and Cynthia Dwork's collaborators, anonymous communications inspired by David Chaum, and access control models tracing to Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder. Case studies often involve deployments in sectors served by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Bank of America, Walmart, and Siemens.

Editorial Board and Peer Review Process

The editorial board comprises academics and practitioners from universities like University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Toronto, University of Washington, University of Pennsylvania, and institutions such as Amazon Web Services and Nokia Bell Labs. Editors coordinate double-blind or single-blind peer review with program committees similar to those used by ACM SIGSAC and manuscript management systems employed across journals linked to Elsevier and Springer Nature. Review processes emphasize methodological rigor and reproducibility, encouraging data and artifact submission and evaluation standards comparable to initiatives from National Institutes of Health and replicability frameworks used in projects at the Simons Foundation.

Publication and Access

Published by the Association for Computing Machinery, the journal is available through ACM Digital Library alongside other periodicals like Communications of the ACM, with subscription and author-pays open-access options reflecting broader debates influenced by organizations such as SPARC and policies from funding bodies like the Wellcome Trust and Horizon Europe. The platform integrates digital object identifiers used across scholarly publishing and indexing services employed by Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. Special issues have been organized in conjunction with conferences such as IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and workshops affiliated with Foundations of Software Engineering.

Impact and Reception

The journal is cited by research across venues including IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Journal of Cryptology, and proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, influencing standards and practices at entities such as IETF, NIST, and privacy regulators within the European Commission. Its articles inform legal and policy debates referenced by the United States Congress and legal scholarship at schools like Yale Law School and Columbia Law School. Metrics of impact align with citation patterns observed in the broader computer science ecosystem encompassing works tied to Google Scholar Citations and institutional rankings by organizations like Times Higher Education.

Category:Computer security journals Category:Association for Computing Machinery academic journals