International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Dear members of the IACR

With the spring conference season in full swing, you have certainly noticed a few changes in IACR's workshops and conferences.

Online proceedings

The online proceedings of TCC 2015 and PKC 2015 are now available to members via the IACR online library at http://www.iacr.org/services/springer.php

Based on IACR's arrangement with Springer, we install access for members to conference proceedings as soon as these are available, which is usually a few weeks before the event. We also implement online access to everyone during the time of the conference and this is valid for a few weeks afterwards. Technically, this uses "referer" authorization, where the general chair includes a link to the online proceedings in the conference website.

In that context, recall that all IACR proceedings four years and older are available as "Gold Open Access" (that is, openly from the publisher's online library), and the younger ones are "Green Open Access."

Submission format:

Compared to when IACR started to publish conference proceedings, authors are nowadays formatting the "final" versions of papers almost by themselves; based on common tools and style files, the result also looks much more uniform than 30 years ago. Discussions among authors, program chairs, the Board of Directors, and conference reviewers during 2014 have now resulted in a change to the "traditional" submission format of N pages, 11pt font, and A4/letter size. For EUROCRYPT and CRYPTO in 2015, the LNCS style of the final version has been preferred or even declared mandatory. As could be expected, this change has created some confusion, but we trust that this was just a transition effect.

The Board, as the representative of all IACR members, acknowledges that there should be continuity across IACR publications. A corresponding policy is being worked out right now and should be adopted uniformly by the community. The main reason to format submissions in the same way as the final accepted version is to make transparent to readers, as well as to reviewers, that the published version and the reviewed version correspond to each other in length and scope. However, no bound on "supplementary material" is foreseen and authors are still strongly encouraged to revise and improve their submissions based on the feedback received.

Parallel sessions:

As explained in my news update from September last year, the Board has asked EUROCRYPT, CRYPTO, and ASIACRYPT to organize parallel sessions for a significant part of the program. EUROCRYPT in Sofia will be the first IACR conference with parallel sessions, and I invite you to check out the program on the website. At the end of this year, we will hold a referendum among the IACR membership for deciding whether the format should be kept like this.

Cryptology Schools:

The Board has approved funding for the following IACR Cryptology Schools:

1. SAC Summer School (S3). August 10--12, 2015, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada. Contact: Orr Dunkelman and Liam Keliher
2. School on Computer-Aided Cryptography: sometime between May 20th and July 10th, 2015, University of Maryland. Contact: Benedikt Schmidt

See the website http://www.iacr.org/schools/ for more information and other upcoming schools.

Closing:

Before I close, let me congratulate Craig Gentry for receiving a MacArthur "genius grant" last year, the first member of our community to receive this prestigious award.

The TCC annual Test of Time (ToT) award was presented for the first time during TCC 2015 this week. This award is given to TCC papers of yore that withstood the test of time. The winners were Silvio Micali and Leonid Reyzin, for their paper "Physically Observable Cryptography" from TCC 2004, receiving the award "for pioneering a mathematical foundation of cryptography in the presence of information leakage in physical systems."

Moreover, TCC has decided to shift its date to fall, and the conference will move there in steps, with TCC 2016 being in January. The Board has recently approved the proposal to hold TCC 2016 in January 2016 in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Best regards,

Christian Cachin, IACR President