International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR 2024 Election

The 2024 election is being held to fill three of nine Director positions.

Position Incumbent
Director Jian Guo
Director Anna Lysyanskaya
Director Bo-Yin Yang

Nominations were due by October 1st, 2024 and are now closed. If you have any questions regarding the nominations, please contact the Election Committee at email address hidden.

Candidates for Election in 2024

The three directors of the IACR for the period 2025 to 2028 are to be elected in the 2024 election. The candidates are listed in randomized order each time this page is loaded.

Director

Three people will be elected from the seven candidates listed below.

Britta Hale

Statement

I have previously served the IACR as General Chair for CRYPTO 2023 and an associated two years as a member of the board, am currently a member of the IACR ethics committee, and have served on multiple PCs. I have also worked to promote openness from national security centers around the world with the research community and awareness of real-world cryptographic gaps. Within my roles I have witnessed the thriving growth of cryptographic research and also associated logistical challenges, including sufficient publication options and conference slots, availability of conference access due to funding or travel restrictions, review overhead while maintaining a high bar for quality, open availability of results, career support for students, and representation of the real-world side of cryptographic applications and industry challenges. As a director, I will contribute my experience to the development and strengthening of the IACR in these areas and furthering the interests of the wide and vibrant community.

Home page
https://faculty.nps.edu/haleb/

Mariana Raykova

Statement

I have been working in applied and theoretical cryptography across academia and industry for over 15 years and the IACR conferences have been my home conferences which I have always enjoyed attending. If elected Director, I would work with the Board of Directors to develop solutions to the challenging questions related to the growth of our field and the current capacity of our conferences, while maintaining the great opportunities these conferences provide for young researchers to increase their visibility, and attracting more people across underrepresented groups in the community.

I have served on the steering committee of RWC for the last 3 years. I was the RWC Scholarship chair for the last two years distributing stipends to over 80 students each year aiming to increase the conference outreach, and also helping to source more funding for stipends. I am the general chair for RWC 2025.

Home page
https://marianapr.github.io/

Bo-Yin Yang

Statement

20 years ago I started my IACR publication trail with CHES and PKC, and still represent those subcommunities. Since then I have been an active member of our community with a long service record. I have been a PC member and a co-chair on various IACR program committees, published and talked at IACR conferences, organized IACR (and other) events, and since 2021 actively participated on the IACR board, since 2022 as an elected member.

I consider myself experienced and adept at running people events. To those who participated when I organized, I hope you had enjoyed the experience. Simultaneously, working on these conferences got me into closer contact with all of you, letting me understand relationships and subcommunities in the IACR and how we work together a lot better.
I am ready to continue on the Board of Directors as part of my long-term commitment to the IACR. If elected again to the BoD, I will:
  1. promote geographic and cultural inclusiveness in our events as well as inclusiveness of all areas of cryptographic research and internal cohesion in our community;
  2. actively embrace and bring back to the IACR real-world cryptographers who currently find it necessary to publish at security venues;
  3. encourage openness and reproducibility: more published code, artifact submissions, and formal verification of code, proofs, and protocols; and
  4. continue to contribute my energy and resources to prop up the already-stretched-thin IACR volunteer workforce.

Longer statement
https://troll.iis.sinica.edu.tw/by-publ/position.html

Home page
https://homepage.iis.sinica.edu.tw/pages/byyang/index_en.html

Jian Guo

Statement

I have been dedicated for cryptography research and IACR community services for 18 years, by serving as IACR board director from 2020, Program Co-Chair of Asiacrypt 2023, General (co-)Chair of FSE 2013 and Asiacrypt 2021, PC member of IACR conferences, co-founder of the Asian-workshop on Symmetric-Key Cryptography (ASK), member of Asiacrypt Steering Committee since 2017. Within NTU in Singapore, I also co-founded and have since been a Director of the Master of Science in Cyber Security program. I also work closely with industry such as being a consultant and principal investigator of R&D projects to solve real-world problems. I would contribute further my experiences to promote research, education, and collaborations in the crypto community.

Longer statement
https://guo.crypto.sg/iacr

Home page
https://guo.crypto.sg/

Anna Lysyanskaya

Statement

It has been an honor to serve on the IACR board for the last twelve years. As always, my priorities for the IACR are:

  1. effective and timely dissemination of high-quality research;
  2. continuing to listen and respond to the IACR members' needs;
  3. remaining an engaged and nurturing community even as we keep growing;
  4. maintaining ties with related research communities, as well policy, standards and funding organizations.
If you elect me to continue in my role as Director, I will continue to focus on these priorities, and to approach any issues that arise with an open mind.

Home page
https://cs.brown.edu/people/alysyans/

Adeline Roux-Langlois

Statement

As an IACR member for over a dozen of years, I appreciate our strong community, where open discussions can happen and valuable connections are formed. I believe that a supportive and inclusive environment is important for moving our field forward and enhancing the excellent research our community is already known for.

My goal is to promote more diversity and support women and underrepresented minorities in research, to contribute to create a community where everyone feels comfortable.

Home page
https://langloi227.users.greyc.fr/

Manoj Prabhakaran

Statement

Having been associated with IACR for over two decades, I have a deep appreciation of the many ways in which it helps nurture research and researchers in the field. Thanks to a committed body of volunteers, the organization has been robustly growing in size and scope while staying true to its core mission.

Going forward, I believe there is much more that IACR can accomplish. Let me use this opportunity to share some thoughts on additional roles for IACR.
As cryptography plays a central role in an increasingly digital society, interdisciplinary research combining cryptography and other areas of digital technology becomes imperative. While collaboration with the security community has thrived over the years, many other areas have emerged as ripe for collaboration: AI/ML, Formal Methods and hardware/micro-architecture design, all deal with several aspects of security, privacy and -- more broadly -- trustworthiness. Interaction between Cryptography and any of these areas will not only be mutually beneficial to the two areas, but also will contribute significantly to the larger goal of making our digital world safer and trustworthy. What can IACR do here? A major challenge in promoting such interaction is the lack of forums where cross-disciplinary research can be shared and appreciated. IACR can play a leading role in creating such venues, perhaps, in the form of new area-specific workshops.
Another avenue for IACR to do more is in popularizing cryptography. For instance, IACR could conduct an 'International Cryptography Olympiad' (along the lines of olympiads in several other fields like Mathematics), to attract high school students to the area. While this will be a major undertaking (perhaps requiring a spin-off organization, in due course), it can boost the reach of the field to all corners of the world and all walks of life, in an unprecedented manner. Around this initiative, IACR can also encourage and facilitate the creation of popular expositions of topics in cryptography.
Finally, IACR can help young researchers transition into faculty careers by providing them with various teaching resources. For instance, creating a private forum for faculty members will help them share/collaborate on creating course material (e.g., exercises with solutions), share teaching tips, etc., in a supportive environment that can make their lives a little easier, while simultaneously raising the level of pedagogy in the field.
I firmly believe that as the IACR community grows, there is room for many more innovative initiatives which can tap into that growth, and engage more researchers with the activities of the association.
If elected to the board of IACR, I will be happy to take the lead in bringing these (or other) proposals to the board with the aim of arriving at broadly acceptable versions of these ventures, and if necessary, help the board put in place mechanisms to execute them. Apart from that, I shall also, of course, share in the tasks of the board that are necessary to keep the well-oiled machine of IACR chugging along.

Home page
https://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~mp/

How To Vote

The election will be conducted electronically from October 15th, 2024 (12pm UTC), to November 15th, 2024 (12pm UTC) using the Helios cryptographically-verifiable election system. If you are interested in learning more about how this works, there is an overview of the Helios system available.

2024 members of the IACR (generally people who attended an IACR conference in 2024) will receive a customized invitation to vote from system at heliosvoting.org with a subject line "Vote: IACR 2024 Election" sent to their email address of record with the IACR. Members may update their email addresses and other information in the membership portal.

Election Committee

MarĂ­a Naya-Plasencia
Chair
Shai Halevi
Bart Preneel