International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 26 December 2016

Announcement Announcement
Dear IACR members,

As a turbulent 2016 nears its end, I would like to give you an update of current IACR activities.

First, let me thank all organizers of the eight (!) IACR conferences in 2016. They are all volunteers and take up the tremendous work of creating an event with 100s of participants and a program selected from 100s of submissions. All conferences ran smoothly and left lasting impressions.

The most recent conference I attended was Asiacrypt in Hanoi, with 2^8 participants and the first cryptology conference of IACR in Vietnam. Asiacrypt has been organized by IACR since 2000; the earlier Asiacrypt/Auscrypt conferences were predecessors to the ownership by IACR. However, Vietnamese cryptanalysts discovered in the logo of Asiacrypt 2016 that the IACR has always been part of AsIACRypt.

After the 2016 election, the Board of Directors will see a couple of new faces for 2017 onward: Welcome, Francois-Xavier Standaert and Joppe Bos; and welcome again Shai Halevi and Brian LaMacchia! In their roles as General Chairs of 2018 conferences, also Orr Dunkelman (Eurocrypt), Tal Rabin (Crypto), and Josef Pieprzyk (Asiacrypt) will join the Board. And Kenny Paterson takes over from Ivan Damgaard as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cryptology.

At the same time, let me thank the leaving Board members for their longstanding service to the IACR: Nigel Smart, Martijn Stam, Christof Paar, and David Pointcheval have contributed to the organization for several decades taken together. They will enjoy future events with less responsibilities.

One important development in 2016 has been the creation of the IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology (ToSC). ToSC is published as gold open access and freely available, published in electronic form by the Ruhr University of Bochum, with Gregor Leander as Managing Editor. ToSC is now available at http://tosc.iacr.org. (Sorry, HTTPS-everywhere enthusiasts, we only have HTTP for this at the moment.) The FSE conference and ToSC operate as a journal/conference hybrid and papers published in ToSC are presented at FSE.

The dates and details of IACR's future events appear on the website as they become available. The minutes of the Board meetings and the summary presentations that I give at each Asia/Euro/Crypto conference are available on the website as well, under About > Documents.

I wish you all the best for 2017 and am looking forward to seeing many of you at the next conferences!

Christian Cachin
IACR President
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