IACR Newsletter

Vol. 22, No. 2, Winter 2005.

Contents

• President's Report
• 2005 Elections
• Visas for IACR events
• Nominations for IACR Fellow deadline approaching
• Calendar of events in cryptology
• Honoring Prof. Dr. Thomas Beth
• Announcements
• Journal of Cryptology September Issue
• Top Downloads from the Cryptology ePrint Archive
• RSS News feed available for the IACR ePrint archive
• Open Positions in Cryptology

President's Report Dec 2005

Dear Colleagues

May I firstly thank you all for helping to make 2005 a good year for IACR by attending our conferences and workshops. Although the attendance at all three of our flagship conference reduced again this year, this was broadly in line with with our expectations and planning. Our workshops were well attended with both FSE and PKC reporting substantial increases in attendance on previous years and this shows a promising trend. In all cases our Program Chairs and their Committees delivered strong technical programmes. As a result IACR remains a strong organisation that is clearly focused on advancing research in the field and supporting you, our members.

2005 was a busy year in many respects, some of the key events included:

Eurocrypt

Eurocrypt 2005 was held in Aarhus, marking a return to Denmark after 15 years. In 1990 the General Chair was Peter Landrock and the Program Chair was Ivan Damgaard. This year Ivan moved roles to be our General Chair with Ronald Cramer as Program Chair. The event was most enjoyable, housed in Scandinavian Congress Center it provided us with an excellent setting for the presentation of the 2005 IACR Fellowships. These were awarded to Kevin McCurley, Gus Simmons and Jacques Stern all of whom joined us at the conference to receive their felllowship plaques in person. This conference seemed to mark the next stage of assaults on hash functions of which we would hear more at Crypto.

Crypto

It was most unfortunate that the winner of the best paper at Crypto, Professor Xiaoyun Wang, was not granted a visa to visit the USA in time for Crypto. She was joint author of the first two papers in the conference, both on efficiently finding collisions in the SHA family of hash functions. On behalf of the Association I spent some considerable time in email and telephone discussions with the State Department of the USA firstly trying to "unblock" the granting of her visa, and subsequently trying to establish how to improve the protocol for overseas visitors (particularly Chinese) to the USA. I am acutely aware that while I was contacting the State Department there were many other senior and highly-respected members of our community also applying pressure to the US Government to resolve the situation. Unfortunately we were unsuccessful and Professor Wang could not attend Crypto. It seems clear that IACR and its members pressure is insufficient to speed up the processing of our conference delegates' visa applications - at least we now know how the protocol works and we should be able to guide delegates and authors more proactively in the future, but this situation remains one that we need to keep a careful eye on.

During the course of Crypto, we also learned of the death of Thomas Beth who passed away early in the morning of Wednesday, August 17 at the age of 55. Thomas organised the meeting in Burg Feuerstein in 1982 that was to lead to the series of conferences now known as "Eurocrypt". His passing means that the Association has lost a great character and a great researcher and pioneer.

But of course Crypto was not dominated by sadness, and the conference was host to Ralph Merkle's IACR Distinguished Lecture - and one that provided a unique insight into both early cryptographic history and the emergence of nanotechnology - only someone of Ralph's capabilities could have presented those two topics seamlessly in a single lecture!

At our membership meeting I was able to announce that I had reached an agreement with Alfed Hoffmann of Springer-Verlag that they would provide all our membership with free online access to all our publications - this produced rapturous applause from the meeting. I report on this matter later in this report.

Asiacrypt

This year Asiacrypt was held in India for the first time. The IACR was represented by our Vice-President Bart Preneel who is no stranger to the venue, Chennai. I was particularly saddened not to be able to attend (I have never been to India) and I understand that the scientific programme was of high quality and everything worked smoothly.

My Board colleagues report that our General Chair, Pandu Rangan faced many difficult challenges - there was a monsoon. Chennai was hard-hit, with 24 cm of rain in 24 hours. There was water in the streets, knee-deep in places, but this did not dent his organisational skills. One of our invited speakers could not attend - again no problem. Then the conference hotel was occupied by the India and Sri Lanka cricket sides, who had their match rained out for three of the five days. The lobby was full of fans and policemen. No problem. Then on the last day the conference venue was preempted by Bill Gates and a bunch of ministers, with all the attendant security cordons, so we had to switch to a nearby hotel. Again, no problem. All in all a very impressive performance - well done Pandu Rangan! Let's hope that our next Asiacrypts will be less eventful for the organisers.

TCC Conference

The Board of IACR is pleased to announce that the The Theory of Cryptology Conference is now an IACR sponsored event and is officially adopted within our workshop series of events.

Election

The IACR election was held towards the end of the year with the results being extremely close - we welcome Yvo Desmedt, Stuart Haber and Antoine Joux to the Board for 2006 and bid a fond farewell to Ed Dawson, Jean-Jacques Quisquater and Rebecca Wright. Each of these departing individuals has contributed a great deal to the IACR in the past years and, on your behalf, I thank them for their efforts and continued support of our Association.

Online Access to Publications

Our relationship with Springer-Verlag who publishes both our Proceedings and our Journal remains strong and mutually beneficial. The most significant event that I am delighted to report is that Springer has now implemented a "Reading Room" dedicated to all IACR Conference and Workshop Proceedings. Currently the software is in the final stages of beta testing and you will all hear from our Membership Secretary early in the New Year when it goes live.

In closing this report, it only remains for me to thank you all for your continued interest and support for our Association - it is through you that IACR remains the premier organisation for cryptology in the world - thankyou.

Andy Clark
IACR President
December 2005

2005 elections

The 2005 election is now complete. Five candidates stood for the three open positions of Director. The three candidates with the highest number of votes were elected. These new directors whose terms will expire on 31 December 2008 are:

• Yvo Desmedt
• Stuart Haber
• Antoine Joux

The Revision of the bylaws also passed with 170 in favor, 45 against.

More information on this year's election is available here .

Visas for IACR events

The issue of Visas to attend IACR events has become a significant issue. Both the next EUROCRYPT in St. Petersburg, Russia and CRYPTO in Santa Barbara, CA, USA require Visas for many to attend.

For information regarding obtaining a Russian visa, there are web sites for the Russian Consulates in UK and France . Note that the form for US and non-US citizens is different.

Information on the US visas can be found here , The time to obtain a US visa is variable, and may involve a visit to the Consulate for an interview. This has taken over 3 months for some individuals in the past. It is advisable to submit Visa applications as soon as possible to avoid last minute problems.

Nominations for IACR Fellow

We hope that you will consider devoting some of your time and effort to nominating or endorsing an IACR-Fellow candidate. IACR members can nominate or endorse other IACR members for this prestigious position. Nominations and endorsements are due on December 31, 2005. More information can be found here .

Calendar of IACR events

• IACR Conferences

  • Eurocrypt 2006 , May 28-June 1, St. Petersburg, Russia.
  • Crypto 2006 , August 20-24, 2006, Santa Barbara, California, USA.
  • Asiacrypt 2006 , December 3-7, Shanghai, China.

• IACR Workshops

  • The third Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC'06), March 5-7, New York, USA.
  • International Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography (PKC 2006), April 24-26, New York City, USA.
  • Fast Software Encryption (FSE 2006), March 15-17, 2006, Graz, Austria
  • Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, CHES 2006 , October 10-13, 2006, Yokohama, Japan.

• Events In Cooperation with IACR

  • 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy , May 21-24, 2006, Berkeley, USA.
  • Third Conference on Email and Anti-Spam , July 2006, Silicon Valley, California, USA.

• Complete Calendar of Cryptology Workshop

Honoring Prof. Dr. Thomas Beth

Our Association has lost a great character and a great pioneer. The IACR president has written a brief note honoring the late Prof. Dr. Thomas Beth .

Announcements

• Some of the rump session presentations and videos are now available .
• IACR has now implemented a policy on irregular submissions .
• The Theory of Cryptology Conference is now an IACR sponsored event.
• 2005 IACR Fellows added to the distinguished list of IACR fellows

Journal of Cryptology

September 2005 issue of the Journal of Cryptology is available to IACR members. The user-id and password for IACR members can be retrieved here .

• Cryptanalysis of Skipjack Reduced to 31 Rounds Using Impossible Differentials , Eli Biham, Alex Biryukov, Adi Shamir
  Presents a cryptanalytic technique, based on impossible differentials, to show that recovering keys of Skipjack reduced from 32 to 31 rounds can be performed faster than exhaustive search.
  
• Secure Classical Bit Commitment Using Fixed Capacity Communication Channels , Adrian Kent
  If mutually mistrustful parties A and B control two or more appropriately located sites, special relativity can be used to guarantee that a pair of messages exchanged by A and B are independent.
  
• Polynomial and Normal Bases for Finite Fields , Joachim Gathen and Michael Nöcker
  Discusses two different ways to speed up exponentiation in nonprime finite fields: reduction of the total number of operations, and fast computation of a single operation.
  
• The Complexity of Certain Multi-Exponentiation Techniques in Cryptography , Roberto M. Avanzi
  Describes, analyzes and compares some combinations of multi-exponentiation algorithms with representations of the exponents.
  
• Partial Key Recovery Attack Against RMAC , Lars R. Knudsen and Chris J. Mitchell
  Describes a new “partial” key recovery attacks against the RMAC block cipher based Message Authentication Code scheme.
  
• Analysis and Design of Distributed Key Distribution Centers , Carlo Blundo and Paolo D’Arco
  Describes Distributed Key Distribution Centers in terms of an information theory model, and presents lower bounds for the resources needed to set up and manage a distributed center.

Top downloads from the Cryptology ePrint Archive

The top six downloads from the ePrint archive for the period May 18th through November 22, 2005. The first two have been noted in this newsletter before and still remain heavily accessed.

• Collisions for Hash Functions MD4, MD5, HAVAL-128 and RIPEMD , X. Wang, D. Feng, X. Lai and H. Yu
  This is the paper for a series of collisions in the hash functions MD4, MD5, HAVAL-128 and RIPEMD that were announced at CRYPTO 2004 Rump Session by Ms. X. Wang.
  
• The Misuse of RC4 in Microsoft Word and Excel , Hongjun Wu
  Reports a flaw in Microsoft Word and Excel's use of the stream cipher RC4. When an encrypted document gets modified and saved, the initialization vector remains the same allowing information to be recovered.
  
• Security and Privacy Issues in E-passports , Ari Juels, David Molnar, and David Wagner
  This paper explores the privacy and security implications of next-generation identity authentication technology in the context of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standard for e-passports.
  
• How to Cheat at Chess: A Security Analysis of the Internet Chess Club , J. Black, M. Cochran and R. Gardner
  The Internet Chess Club (ICC) is a popular online chess server with more than 30,000 members. While the security protocol used between client and server claims sufficient security for sensitive information to be transmitted, this paper shows that this is not true.
  
• High Speed Architecture for Galois/Counter Mode of Operation (GCM) , Bo Yang, Sambit Mishra, Ramesh Karri
  Describes a fully pipelined implementation of AES and GCM that can sustain 34 Gbps without using exotic hardware technology.
  
• Picking Virtual Pockets using Relay Attacks on Contactless Smartcard Systems , Ziv Kfir and Avishai Wool
  This paper demonstrates that the assumptions about RFID based smartcards only operating at a short distance does not hold and suggests a low cost system that can operate at an unlimited distance between the attacker and the victim.

Complete list of recent papers in the IACR ePrint Archive

RSS News feed available for the IACR ePrint archive

Following a suggestion by several people, we are now providing RSS feeds of the latest papers submitted to the IACR ePrint archive. This information is updated once an hour. More information on available feeds and formats is available here .

Open positions in Cryptology

Current announcements on the IACR Website for Open Positions in Cryptology .

• University of Bonn
• University of Tsukuba, Japan
• Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
• University of Waterloo
• University College London
• Indiana University
• Stevens Institute of Technology
• Université catholique de Louvain

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