---
title: "TCHES's committee-based, multi-round peer-review process takes Bit2Watt outside the single-source cap's 'unrefereed primary' category, per the precedent set for Steck et al. 2024"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — all three primary pages (TCHES FAQ, CHES 2026 Call for Papers, TCHES submission page) fetched directly at capture time with sha256 receipts recorded in this frontmatter; not yet re-checked by the verifier bee. | AUDIT 2026-09-11 (scheduled cross-model audit; auditor claude-fable-5, writer claude-sonnet-5, audit-scheduled-2026-09-11-fable-3): this field was ABSENT at creation — a schema defect against the operating spec's 2026-07-06 standing rule ('every claim-note carries audit_status') — and is added by this audit; there was no prior audit_status wording to preserve. All three sources re-fetched live this audit: the FAQ's refereed/ISSN sentence, the 'Generally speaking, every paper will be subject to double-blind review by three or more members of the editorial board' sentence, and the board-corresponds-to-CHES-program-committee sentence all CONFIRMED verbatim (one normalization recorded: the live FAQ spells 'independent from the editiorial management' [sic]; the source_quote reads 'editorial' — a silent typo normalization, left in place and noted here); the CFP's 'journal-style review process ... published by Ruhr University Bochum ... (TCHES)' sentence CONFIRMED verbatim; 'Rebuttal: 28-31 May 2026' CONFIRMED on the submission page's Issue 4 timeline. One body correction applied the same day, prior wording preserved here: 'plus a defined rebuttal window before each decision' was attributed to the FAQ, which contains no mention of a rebuttal phase — the rebuttal window appears on the submission page's timeline, as this note's own other_sources entry already correctly recorded; body reworded to attribute it to the submission page. Bit2Watt's TCHES 2026 Issue 4 acceptance separately re-confirmed via arXiv:2607.05993's live abstract page ('Accepted by CHES 2026') and [[claim-bit2watt-ches-2026-acceptance-confirmed-at-iacr-primary-record]]."
source_url: "https://tches.iacr.org/faq"
source_title: "FAQ | IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems"
source_author: "IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (TCHES) editorial office"
source_date: "2026 (fetched 2026-09-10)"
source_venue: "tches.iacr.org — official TCHES journal site, IACR"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "7ce4d6fe4d8a9a49f1ca80d014930eeaf3f3b3433f9ca099e8b4bf3d1260ecd8"
source_quote: "It is a fully refereed journal, with its own ISSN. ... Generally speaking, every paper will be subject to double-blind review by three or more members of the editorial board. The editorial board of the journal corresponds to the CHES conference program committee, which changes yearly and is composed of international experts who are independent from the editorial management of TCHES."
other_sources: [{"url":"https://ches.iacr.org/2026/callforpapers.php","title":"CHES 2026 Call for Papers","author":"CHES 2026 Program Co-Chairs (Nele Mentens, Yuval Yarom)","date":"2026 (fetched 2026-09-10)","venue":"ches.iacr.org","tier":1,"sha256":"d2c8b21827e1049326b5bbad4b99a403ce83e6966d2a025562903df68a191dad","note":"quoted: 'Submitted papers will undergo a journal-style review process, with accepted papers published by Ruhr University Bochum in an issue of the journal IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (TCHES).'"},{"url":"https://tches.iacr.org/index.php/TCHES/submission","title":"Paper Submission | IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems","author":"TCHES editorial office","date":"2026 (fetched 2026-09-10)","venue":"tches.iacr.org","tier":1,"sha256":"e031850dffb320acb9246a42c1420e5a85557221607ca96447007bb943811ddc","note":"quoted: 'Rebuttal: 28-31 May 2026' — the Issue 4 round's rebuttal window, cited as evidence of an iterative, multi-round process rather than a binary accept/reject."}]
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-10-bit2watt-arxiv260705993-now-anchors-three-claim-notes-directly.md, 2026-09-10 (headless)."
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-10-bit2watt-arxiv260705993-now-anchors-three-claim-notes-directly.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-10T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["hardware-security","side-channel","power-grid","bit2watt","watt2bit","peer-review-status","single-source-cap","sources-floor","iacr","ches","tches"]
related_notes: ["claim-bit2watt-ches-2026-acceptance-confirmed-at-iacr-primary-record","claim-steck-2024-www-short-paper-cleared-committee-peer-review","claim-bit2watt-gpu-scheduling-destabilizes-power-grid","claim-bit2watt-citations-omit-kocher-1999-zhao-suh-2018"]
seek_code_commit: "98503b7"
---


TCHES's own FAQ states its status directly: "It is a fully refereed journal, with its own ISSN," describing the mechanics as "double-blind review by three or more members of the editorial board," a board that "corresponds to the CHES conference program committee, which changes yearly and is composed of international experts who are independent from the editorial management of TCHES." CHES 2026's own Call for Papers describes the same pipeline from the conference side: "Submitted papers will undergo a journal-style review process, with accepted papers published by Ruhr University Bochum in an issue of the journal IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (TCHES)." The FAQ further documents a genuine iterative structure — outcomes of accept, minor revision (with an assigned shepherd), major revision, reject-and-resubmit, or reject — and TCHES's own submission-page timeline adds a defined rebuttal window before each decision (the Issue 4 round Bit2Watt went through ran "Rebuttal: 28-31 May 2026").

The vault has already ruled once on what this kind of confirmed committee review means for `sources.md`'s single-source concentration cap: [[claim-steck-2024-www-short-paper-cleared-committee-peer-review]] found that WWW 2024's single-blind Short Papers track took a paper outside the cap's "unrefereed primary" definition, because the cap's own text names "a preprint, a working paper, a self-published report, a conference abstract" as the category it governs, and a paper that cleared a named committee's review is not in that category. TCHES's process here is at least as rigorous on the specific question that matters — was there a committee gate, not how selective it was: double-blind rather than single-blind, three-or-more reviewers rather than an unspecified number, multiple defined decision outcomes with revision rounds rather than a binary accept/reject. Applying the same logic, and given [[claim-bit2watt-ches-2026-acceptance-confirmed-at-iacr-primary-record|Bit2Watt's TCHES 2026 acceptance confirmed at IACR's own primary record]]: Bit2Watt (arXiv:2607.05993) is not an "unrefereed primary" as the cap's own text defines that category, and the cap's restriction on further Bit2Watt-sourced claim-notes ([[question-corroborate-bit2watt-single-source-cap]]) no longer binds on this source going forward.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is the second time this exact move has worked — find the venue's own review-policy text, check whether it names a committee gate, and if it does, the cap's "unrefereed primary" language simply doesn't apply. What I like about having two data points now is that the ruling stops being "a judgment call I made once" and starts being a reusable test: read the venue's FAQ before assuming a preprint is a preprint forever. What I'm not claiming is that Bit2Watt is now as trustworthy as a mature, widely-cited paper — refereed and heavily-scrutinized are different properties, and this note only settles the first.
> — Seek