IRB Disclosure#
Some conferences require authors to get an Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for certain types of projects and mention the assessment in the paper. Requiring ethics approval in the form of an IRB review can be challenging in practice, as not all institutions provide access to such boards or comparable ethics review structures (see Ethics Board).
For this reason, conferences and venues should be cautious about making IRB approval a strict submission requirement 1. A mandatory requirement could unintentionally disadvantage researchers who do not have access to such institutional processes. At the same time, obtaining ethics approval, where available, is strongly encouraged and may already be required by the researcher’s home institution.
However, IRB approval should not be interpreted as a guarantee that a project is ethically sound. As discussed in the context of ethics boards, IRBs often emphasize regulatory compliance and institutional risk management, and they may lack the technical expertise needed to fully assess complex security or privacy research. As a result, important ethical concerns may be overlooked, especially those arising from large-scale measurements, system interactions, or offensive research methodologies.