Regulations

The review process for TCHES, Volume 2025, Issues 1–4, will be governed by the following regulations:

• TCHES follows IACR policy, i.e.,
  https://www.iacr.org/docs/irregular.pdf
  with respect to irregular submissions: any submission deemed to be irregular (e.g., which has been submitted, in parallel, to another conference with proceedings), will be instantly rejected. IACR reserves the right to share information about submissions with other program committees and editorial boards to ensure strict enforcement of the policy.
• TCHES follows IACR policy with respect to conflicts of interest that could prevent impartial review. A conflict of interest is considered to occur automatically whenever one (co-)author of a submitted paper and a TCHES editorial board member
  • were advisee/advisor at any time,
  • have been affiliated to the same institution in the past 2 years,
  • have published 2 or more jointly authored papers in the past 3 years, or
  • are immediate family members.
  For an interpretation of the above reasons, please refer to the IACR policy on CoIs (https://www.iacr.org/docs/conflicts.pdf). Note that conflicts may also arise for reasons other than those just listed. Examples include closely related technical work, cooperation in the form of joint projects or grant applications, business relationships, close personal friendships, instances of personal enmity.
• Full transparency is of utmost importance, authors and reviewers must disclose to the chairs or editor any circumstances that they think may create bias, even if it does not raise to the level of a CoI. At the time of submission, authors are required to
  1. make a declaration regarding any conflicts of interest (including reasons for the conflict), and
  2. guarantee they will deliver a presentation at the associated CHES conference if their submission is accepted for publication in TCHES.
• Each paper will be double-blind reviewed by at least three members of the TCHES editorial board.
• In order to improve the quality of the review process, authors are given the opportunity to submit a rebuttal (between the indicated dates) after receiving the associated reviews.
• The review process outcome is either an outright accept or reject decision, or one of two deferred decision types. Specifically, "minor revision" means the paper is conditionally accepted, and assigned a shepherd to verify the revision is adequate, "major revision" means the authors are invited to submit a revision of their article to one of the following two submission deadlines; a later re-submission will be treated as a new paper.
• When submitting a major revision, follow the instructions in the submission system to indicate that the paper is a major revision and to provide the ID of the earlier submission.
• To ensure consistency, the reviewers assigned for a revised paper are ideally the same as for the original submission.
• Resubmission of papers that have previously been rejected from TCHES is only allowed after major modifications and approval by the Editors-in-Chief prior to submission.
• Authors of submitted papers are also highly encouraged to check the TCHES FAQ
  https://tches.iacr.org/index.php/TCHES/faq
  for answers to questions related to policy and procedures governing CHES.