International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The IACR Fellows 2014 have been announced:

• Ran Canetti
• Antoine Joux
• Eyal Kushilevitz
• Moti Yung

Statement of Principle from the IACR Membership on Mass Surveillance and the Subversion of Cryptography

The membership of the IACR repudiates mass surveillance and the undermining of cryptographic solutions and standards. Population-wide surveillance threatens democracy and human dignity. We call for expediting research and deployment of effective techniques to protect personal privacy against governmental and corporate overreach.

The IACR Board of Directors is searching for volunteers to help with the website, the Cryptology ePrint Archive, and other IACR online services. Maintenance and future expansion of the online services of the IACR are crucial part for the interaction among cryptographers. We are interested in motivated cryptographers who would like to exploit their systems skills in a LAMP environment.

If you are interested in serving the community in this way, please contact the President of the IACR at president@iacr.org.

Scott Vanstone (1947-2014)

It is a great honor for me to have been elected as the President of the IACR and a challenge at the same time. Today cryptography is a vibrant research field that offers important and exciting questions to work on. It has not lost any of its fascination to me over the last 20 years since I entered the field as a graduate student -- quite to the contrary. In the age of cloud computing, cryptology continues to be a key technology for securing the digital world. Starting with the Snowden revelations in 2013, cryptography has also regained a level of political visibility that reminds me of the debates that were taking place in the 1990's. This gives us, as cryptologists and members of the IACR, an exposure that is hard to match.

In 2013 cryptology demonstrated (again) the power of its contributions to society, science, and technology by Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali winning the ACM Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science. As the ACM Turing Award page shows very visibly (http://amturing.acm.org/bysubject.cfm), cryptology is one of the most promising research topics for winning the Turing Award. Congratulations, Shafi and Silvio!

The IACR's events were well-attended and well-organized in 2013. The first two of our 2014 events, TCC in San Diego and FSE in London, are already over with about 120 and about 160 attendees, respectively. For the upcoming Eurocrypt in Copenhagen, everyone is advised to book early. Due to Eurovision Song Contest 2014 in the week just before Eurocrypt, hotels may be difficult to find or expensive.

The composition of the Board of Directors has changed for 2014. New members of the Board are: Ivan Damgaard, as new JoC Editor-in-Chief; Steven Galbraith, Asiacrypt 2015 General Chair; Svetla Petkova-Nikova, Eurocrypt 2015 General Chair; and Thomas Ristenpart, Crypto 2015 General Chair. Matt Franklin will stay on the Board in 2014 for easing the transition of the Journal to Ivan Damgaard.

IACR exists only through the work of volunteers, who bring our conferences, events, online systems, and publications to life. I'd like to thank everyone for contributing their time to IACR. It is hard work but important for our organization. At the same time, I am looking forward to hearing about your future plans and ideas for how you would like to help and to improve IACR.

Very concretely, the European members of the Board of Directors are currently looking for a proposal to host Eurocrypt 2016. If you are inclined and would like to know more about exposing your skills as a conference organizer, please step forward and contact Michel Abdalla or any other member of the Board.

For 2014 and beyond, the IACR will have to address the challenges to scientific publishing posed by two factors, by the Internet and by the growing field. The IACR has a long tradition of operating with a liberal, author-friendly attitude to copyright. This has made it possible, among other things, that all IACR publications starting from 1982 are now openly available over the Internet via the IACR website; only the last two years are restricted to IACR members. Second, the growth in our field has boosted the number of paper submissions and conference attendees, but also led to record low acceptance rates and excessive reviewing load. We will resume the open discussion on the future of IACR's publications, in order to address these challenges.

With my new role as President, I have to cut back on other ends. I am glad that Nigel Smart has taken over my job as co-editor of the Cryptology ePrint Archive, or "eprint" as called by most. He shares this workload with Tal Rabin. Almost 15 years ago, when I had created the online system that still runs today, it had not occurred to me that the eprint archive would ever play such a useful role for research in cryptology.

Shortly before writing this, the sad news reached us that Scott Vanstone has passed away on March 2nd. He was a giant in the field, and the IACR will honor his contributions separately. Let me only mention that he was a past Director of the IACR and had helped to grow the organization, and he became an IACR Fellow in 2011.

I look forward to interacting with you in 2014.

Christian Cachin
IACR President

This letter had stated erroneously that Scott Vanstone was past President of the IACR; in fact, he was a member of the Board of Directors.

The Ethics Committee of the IACR is responsible for providing recommendations to editors, program chairs, program-committee members, and reviewers concerning fairness and ethical aspects of all matters under the influence of the IACR, such as its operations, its events, and its publications.

The mission of the Ethics Committee is described in the "IACR Policy for the Ethics Committee", available at http://www.iacr.org/docs/

The Ethics committee has discussed only a handful of cases in 2013. In the interest of raising awareness for ethical matters among the researchers in cryptology, the Ethics Committee may occasionally inform the IACR members about its work. An account of one case follows.

A team of authors submitted a paper to a non-IACR conference in the field of cryptology and information security. After submitting the work, the authors developed their method further and discovered other ways to attack the problem. Before receiving an acceptance or rejection notification from the conference, the authors had written another paper on the second method and submitted this to a second conference, this one sponsored by the IACR. The second paper did not cite or mention the first paper.

Some reviewers in the overlap of the two program committees spotted a similarity of the works, and, in line with the IACR Policy on Irregular Submissions, they shared this information with the program chairs of the two venues. The program chair of the first conference then rejected the first paper declaring that it was a "potential double submission" and informed the program chair of the IACR conference about this. The authors then reached out to the IACR Ethics Committee and explained their case. They wanted to obtain a clarification that there was no double submission.

The Ethics Committee reviewed the situation and examined the submitted papers superficially. The committee then concluded that there was no obvious case of "parallel submissions" as described in the IACR Policy and that the second paper should enter the regular reviewing process of the IACR conference. The committee also remarked that it cannot make any statement towards the first conference because it is not an IACR venue. To the committee, it seemed that there was a misunderstanding because the existence and nature of technical links between the contributions of the two papers were not mentioned by the authors.

Last but not least, the committee recommended to the authors that, in the interest of being transparent in scientific work, authors should always cite existing known related work, even when a new contribution would not directly build on it. Furthermore, considering the delicate issues around double submissions, this point was particularly important with related work from the same authors.

IACR Ethics Committee (2013)

• Josh Benaloh
• Thomas Berson
• Christian Cachin (chair)

Nominations and endorsements for IACR Fellows are due on December 31. Instructions are available at http://www.iacr.org/fellows/#Nominations

I'm looking for a volunteer to edit the videos from TCC 2013. The data consists of about 30 DVDs, or about 100GB of video data. There are two DVDs for each session (the stage and the presentation screen), and they need to be re-encoded for streaming distribution on youtube. If we decide that this is too much, we might opt for only the presentation screen videos from the invited talks, but ideally I'd like to do the following: 1. split the VOB files into one file per talk. The files should be named in such a way that they can be matched to cryptodb, e.g., 24520.mp4 for http://www.iacr.org/cryptodb/data/paper.php?pubkey=24520 2. encode each file as AAC-LC audio with H.264 video, as described on https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en. 3. upload the resulting files to www.iacr.org so that they can be archived and uploaded to the IACR youtube channel. If interested, contact cryptodb@iacr.org.

IACR and Springer are pleased to offer you free access to the Journal of Cryptology and the IACR proceedings volumes for CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, ASIACRYPT, FSE, CHES, PKC, and TCC. Simply use the links below to access these publications.

HTML version

One of the key roles of the the IACR is the review and dissemination of scientific publications. In the past three years, there has been an intensive discussion of publication options, in which several alternatives have been reviewed thoroughly.

At the end of 2012, the IACR has signed a new publication contract with Springer for a 4-year period (2013-2017); IACR continues to publish the proceedings of our flagship conferences and workshops in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. This new contract makes substantial progress towards broader access to our publications and reduces the cost of publications. However, the IACR Board believes that the area of scientific publications will undergo further changes in the next years, in particular towards open access. In addition, the expansion of our field (more than 1200 submissions and more than 250 publications per year) has resulted in a steadily increasing reviewing load. Some other scientific communities have updated their publication models with a shift towards journal publications.

The IACR Board understands that any change to our publication model has major implications on our members and on the cryptographic community at large. We also have learned that changing this model would be complex and time consuming: in order to be ready for a new publication model in 2018, a new strategy would need to be in place by mid 2015.

In view of this, the IACR Board has decided to start an open discussion on the future of IACR publications. In order to focus this discussion, Nigel Smart has drafted a radical proposal, that would involve moving towards a journal publication model. This proposal has been outlined at the rump session of Eurocrypt'13 and has been further refined based on comments received. The reason for working with a detailed document is that this seems the best way to make sure that all issues are identified and detailed solutions are proposed and compared.

It should be fully understood that this document is a strawman proposal: it does not reflect the view of the IACR Board; the document has also not been discussed with the steering committees of the workshops. Its only intention is to start an open discussion. In particular, the Board welcomes detailed comments and alternative proposals for the future of IACR publications.

We are looking forward to hearing from the community.

Bart Preneel
IACR-International Association for Cryptologic Research

• Document
• Discussion Forum

At the ePrint forum (http://eprint.iacr.org/forum/list.php?14), there is currently a discussion going on about possible changes to the IACR publication system.
Some of the latest postings:

• Assigning Papers to Talks (cbw)
• Some issues + Counter proposal (Orr)
• Change is needed, but slow change is important (lindell)
• How to handle resubmissions? (ivandamgard)
• Questions (nigel)

You can access the full text at the link given above.
In case you want to contribute, you need to request a login/password via the same link.

Recently, the Turing award was presented to the IACR members Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali. They were honoured for their fundamental work in theoretical mathematics and cryptology. Congratulations from the IACR!

ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) award the "Gödel Prize" to three of our members, namely Antoine Joux, Dan Bonehn and Matthew K. Franklin for their work in cryptology and security. Congratulations from the IACR!

The 2013 IACR Fellows have been announced. The new fellows are: Dan Boneh, Ronald Cramer, Claude Crépeau, Lars Knudsen, Hugo Krawczyk, Victor S. Miller, Rafail Ostrovsky

NIST has announce Keccak as SHA-3 winner. You find more information about Keccak at http://keccak.noekeon.org/ The full statement of the NIST is found at the link below.

Videos from Crypto 2012 are now online at YouTube and cryptodb.

There is now a BibTeX file available that contains all IACR publications in cryptodb.

The IACR Board is seeking volunteers to assist with the maintenance of the IACR website and to serve as general chair for a future Crypto. If you are interested in these tasks, send a message to president@iacr.org.

The IACR fellows of 2012 have been selected:

• Mihir Bellare
• Eli Biham
• Manuel Blum
• Andrew Odlyzko
• Phil Rogaway
• Claus Schnorr
• Jennifer Seberry

The IACR fellow programme was started in 2002. Within this programme, we recognize outstanding IACR members for technical and professional contributions that:

• Advance the science, technology, and practice of cryptology and related fields
• Promote the free exchange of ideas and information about cryptology and related fields
• Develop and maintain the professional skill and integrity of individuals in the cryptologic community
• Advance the standing of the cryptologic community in the wider scientific and technical world and promote fruitful relationships between the IACR and other scientific and technical organizations