IACR Newsletter

The newsletter of the International Association for Cryptologic Research .

Vol. 24, No. 1, Fall 2009.

Contents

IACR Elections 2009

Official Information

The 2009 elects are due. At present, 3 directors are elected. Please participate by returning your ballot in time (November 15).

If you have questions about the elections, please contact the election committee:
Christian Cachin (Chair),Josh Benaloh (Returning officer), and Ed Dawson.

Message from the President

I am very pleased to invite you to read the Fall 2009 edition of the IACR newsletter. This is the right occasion to warmly thank Jim Hughes for serving as newsletter editor during the past years. Jim has done an excellent job. I sincerely hope that we will be able to continue the tradition he started to broadcast the Crypto rump sessions. Christopher Wolf has now taken on the responsibility for the newsletter. Do not hesitate to contact him if you have suggestions for improvement or (even better) contributions.

After serving for 20 months as president, I am pleased to report that the IACR is doing well. We have more than 1500 members and our financial situation is healthy. We organize each year three flagship conferences and four workshops with high quality programs and with strong participation. The Journal of Cryptology has an excellent scientific reputation and it is expanding. During its first six years, our fellowship program has recognized 22 outstanding IACR members. All of this is made possible by volunteers who generously contribute their time to the cryptologic community. These individuals deserve your thanks and appreciation. I would hereby also like to thank the companies and organizations who sponsor our events.

The main challenge we face as organization is the changing publication environment, with an increased focus on electronic distribution and open access. A major issue that affects researchers in academia is that Thomson has decided to move Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) from the ISI SCI (Science Citation Index) to the ISI Proceedings list: as a consequence no impact factor is provided for our LNCS proceedings from 2006 onwards. While it is clear that our events still have a high scientific impact, this is a concern and the IACR Board is trying to address this. The IACR wants to make our scientific work available to a broad audience. As an IACR member, you have free access to the IACR reading room at Springer; two years after publication, all our conference papers are openly available via the IACR archive that complements the IACR eprint server. The IACR board has negotiated with Springer that members from national cryptologic organizations who cannot afford IACR membership will also receive free access to the IACR reading room.

Each year in October, IACR holds elections for its Board. I encourage you to participate by returning your paper ballots. After these elections, we plan an extensive trial of an electronic voting scheme with a view of adopting this system from 2010 onwards. You can trust that the IACR Board will carefully evaluate the security and usability of this system and will definitely consider your inputs on this matter.

I would like to conclude by inviting you to reflect on how IACR can better serve the cryptologic community. The IACR Board welcomes your views and appreciates your contributions.

Bart Preneel
IACR President

Book-Reviewing System

Since Crypto 2009, IACR operats a book reviewing system. Idea is that IACR members write reviews for other members, and hence allow us to save time by finding the best book for our purpose - not by reading all of them, but concise reviews instead. From October onwards, the reviews will appear here

Each member can participate by writing a review. Both Taylor & Francis and Springer help us with this reviewing system by donating books. Each member who writes a review gets the corresponding book for free.

At the end of this newsletter you find a list of books. If you are interested in participating by writing a review, please check here for the list of currently available books and contact the IACR newsletter editor (newsletter at iacr dot org). Don't forget your surface address. We don't have e-Books yet ;-)

Further Service

  1. IACR Reading Room
  2. Open Positions
  3. ePrint
  4. IACR Archive

a. Springer operates the so-called "IACR reading room". You can have online access to the online proceedings of IACR workshops and the Journal of Cryptology. If you don't have access yet, follow the following link

b. IACR provides a listing of open positions with a focus on cryptology. The listing is available on the Web here and kept up to date on a weekly basis.

c. The Cryptology ePrint Archive provides rapid access to recent research in cryptology. Papers have been placed here by the authors and did not undergo any refereeing process other than verifying that the work seems to be within the scope of cryptology and meets some minimal acceptance criteria and publishing conditions.

d. The proceedings of some conferences past are made available by the IACR in an archive . The copyright for these papers is held by the IACR.

Upcoming Events

IACR Conferences

  1. Asiacrypt 2009 , December 6-10, 2009, Tokyo, Japan.
  2. Eurocrypt 2010 , May 30-June 3, 2010, Nice, France.
  3. Crypto 2010, August 15-19, 2010, Santa Barbara, USA.
  4. Asiacrypt 2010, December 5-9, 2010, Singapore.
  5. Eurocrypt 2011, May 15-19, 2011, Tallinn, Estonia.
  6. Crypto 2011, August 14-18, 2011, Santa Barbara, USA.
  7. Asiacrypt 2011, December 4-8, 2011, Seoul, Korea.
  8. Eurocrypt 2012, April 15-19, 2012, Cambridge, UK.

IACR Workshops

  1. Fast Software Encryption (FSE 2010) , February 7-10, 2010, Seoul, Korea.
  2. Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC 2010) , February 9-11, 2010, Zurich, Switzerland.
  3. Public Key Cryptography (PKC 2010) , May 26-28, 2010, Paris, France.
  4. CHES 2010, August 18-20, 2010, Santa Barbara, USA.

Events in cooperation with IACR

  1. Selected Areas in Cryptography 2009 (SAC 2009) , August 13-14, Calgary, Canada.
  2. Conference on Information Theoretic Security (ICITS 2009) , December 3-6, 2009, Shizuoka, Japan.
  3. China International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology (Inscrypt 2009) , December 12-15, 2009, Beijing, China.

Further events can be found here . You can also add your events or calls for special issues of journals there.

Membership survey

End of August a membership survey took place. With approx. 760 answers returned within the 7 days, we are way above expectations: usually, these kind of surveys have a feedback rate of 5-10% - as we included a total of 2000 people, we had a feedback ratio of 37%.

We want to thank all members for their participation and hope that the survey results will give some valuable feedback to the board of directors.

Reports on Past Events

Asiacrypt 2008 , December 7-11, 2008, Melbourne, Australia

Asiacrypt 2008 was held in Melbourne Australia from December 7 to 11. There were 190 participants from over 30 countries. The meeting took place at the Hilton on the Park in central Melbourne. The dinner was held at the Melbourne aquarium on the evening of December 10 amidst tropical fish from the Great Barrier Reef. The conference organizers are grateful for the support of Deakin and Maquarrie Universities, Sun Microsystems, the Melbourne Convention centre, Cambridge University Press and SECIA.

Programme chair was Josef Pieprzyk, General chair was Lynn Batten.

Eurocrypt 2009 , April 26-30, 2009, Cologne, Germany

Eurocrypt 2009 took place April 26-30, 2009 in Cologne, Germany. With 447 registered participants (including 160 students), it was the biggest Eurocrypt since 2002 and not far away from the all-time high in the year 2000 (471 attendees). The 450 participants came from 60+ countries, with Germany (117), France (46) and the US (36) having the biggest share and two Australians presumably the furthest travel. The local organization lay in the hands of the Horst Görtz Institute of IT-Security from the Ruhr-University of Bochum (Germany).

The program was well balanced, covering all aspects of modern cryptography. Dennis Hofheinz and Eike Kiltz received the best paper award for their paper "Practical Chosen Ciphertext Secure Encryption from Factoring". The invited lecturers Phillip Rogaway and Shafi Goldwasser spoke on "Practice-Oriented Provable-Security and the Social Construction of Cryptography" and "Cryptography without (Hardly any) Secrets?", respectively. Full programme: http://www.iacr.org/conferences/eurocrypt2009/program.html

For the social programme on Tuesday afternoon, the participants split up into different groups to see the Chocolate Museum (96 participants), the Wallraf-Richartz Museum of Art (23), follow a guided walking tour through Cologne (30), do a river cruise (63) - or to explore Cologne by bike (18), despite some rain in the beginning. The conference dinner was held on a boat which cruised the river Rhine until 10pm. The last guests left around half past midnight.

Programme chair was Antoine Joux, General chair was Alexander May.

FSE 2009 , February 22-25, 2009, Leuven, Belgium

The 16th International Workshop on Fast Software Encryption (FSE 2009) was held in Leuven Belgium from Feburary 22 to 25. With 221 registered participants from 30 countries (including 62 students), it was the largest FSE ever. The local organization was in the hands of the COSIC group of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, managed by Bart Preneel as general chair; Orr Dunkelman of ENS Paris was the program chair.

The conference venue was the splendid K.U.Leuven University Hall, a building dating back to 1317. On Monday evening, the participants enjoyed a lively big band concert accompanied by a Belgian beer tasting session; some of the participants may have recognized the conductor. The workshop banquet was held at the Faculty Club in the 13th century Infirmerie of the Grand Beguinage.

The FSE program committee received 77 submissions, of which one was withdrawn. After an intensive review and discussion process, 24 papers (31.5%) were accepted. The program was complemented by two invited talks. Shay Gueron spoke on "Intel's New AES Instructions for Enhanced Performance and Security"; the title of Matt Robshaw's lecture was "Looking back at the eSTREAM Project." Martijn Stam received the best paper award for his paper "Blockcipher Based Hashing Revisited". Daniel J. Bernstein chaired a lively rump session with four announcements and 13 scientific presentations.

Public Key Cryptology (PKC 2009) , March 18-20, 2009, Irvinie, CA, USA

PKC 2009 was held at the campus of the University of California in Irvine, California, on March 18-20, 2009. The conference was attended by 75 participants, roughly half of whom were students. About 35 attendees came from Europe, 25 from the US, and 15 from Asia. The conference program covered various aspects of public key cryptography ranging from number theory to multi-party protocols. The best paper award was given to Alexander May and Maike Ritzenhofen for their paper "Implicit Factoring: On Polynomial Time Factoring Given Only an Implicit Hint". Our invited speakers were Amit Sahai, who gave a talk on new compilers from OT to secure computation, and Anna Lysyanskaya, who gave a talk on anonymous and delegatable credentials. The full program can be seen at http://www.iacr.org/workshops/pkc2009/program.html The social program involved a trip to the beach featuring a traditional Orange County beach beer shack, followed by a dinner at a Newport Coast restaurant.

Conference organizers, Gene Tsudik and Stanislaw Jarecki, are grateful for the support extended to PKC'09 by our commercial sponsors, Experian, Google, Microsoft Research, and Qualcomm, as well as by our school, the Bren School of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine, and by the CalIT2 Institute which provided us with the conference venue.

Conference chairs were Stanislaw Jarecki and Gene Tsudik.

Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC 2009) , March 17-19, 2009, San Francisco, USA

TCC'09 was held at the Golden Gateway Hotel in San Francisco from March 17th to the 19th. The conference attracted 110 participants from 17 countries. Close to half of the participants were students. The program chair was Omer Reingold and the general chair was Dan Boneh.

The program included 33 papers and two fantastic invited talks given by Chris Peikert and Cynthia Dwork. Chris spoke about "Some Recent Progress in Lattice-Based Cryptography" and Cynthia spoke about "The Differential Privacy Frontier." The full program is available here .

The rump session, chaired by Rafael Pass, went for three hours and was full of the latest research plus a few entertaining talks about the theory of cryptography.

The conference was sponsored by Voltage Security, Microsoft Research, Google, D. E. Shaw, and IBM Research. Grants from these organizations enabled us to support all participating students who requests financial support.

Programme chair was Omer Reingold, General chair was Dan Boneh.

Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT 2009) , July 7-10, 2009, Milan, Italy

SECRYPT 2009 (the International Conference on Security and Cryptography) was held in Milan, Italy, from 7 to 10 July, in cooperation with IACR, IEEE, IEICE and sponsored/organized by INSTICC. This conference reflects a continuing effort to increase the dissemination of recent research among professionals who work on the fields of security and cryptography, especially for the five scientific areas included in the conference: Access Control and Intrusion Detection, Network Security and Protocols, Cryptographic Techniques and Key Management, Information Assurance, and Security in Information Systems and Software Engineering. The keynote speaker was Pierangela Samarati, from the University of Milan. She is the coordinator of the Working Group on Security of the Italian Association for Information Processing (AICA), and the Italian representative in the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) Technical Committee 11 (TC-11) on "EDP Security".

SECRYPT is one of the events that belong to ICETE (the International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications) which included 3 other co-located conferences related to Telecommunications, namely: WINSYS (Wireless Information Networks and Systems), ICE-B (e-Business) and SIGMAP (Signal Processing and Multimedia Applications). ICETE 2009 received 300 papers in total, from more than 50 different countries in all continents, which demonstrates the global dimension of ICETE 2009. To evaluate each submission, a double blind paper evaluation method was used and each paper was reviewed by at least two experts from the International Program Committee. In the end, 114 papers were selected for oral presentation and publication in the proceedings, corresponding to a 38% acceptance ratio. Of these only 34 were accepted as full papers (11% of submissions) and 80 as short papers (27%). A short list of about 30 papers will be selected so that revised and extended versions of these papers will be published in book by Springer-Verlag.

Conference chairs were Joaquim Filipe and Mohammad S. Obaidat. Programme chairs were Manu Malek, Eduardo Fernández-Medina, and Javier Hernando.

AfricaCrypt2009 , June 22-25, 2009, Tunis, Tunisia

The Second International Conference on Cryptology AfricaCrypt2009 took place at "Gammarth", Tunis Tunisia. The conference placed under the patronage of the Ministry of Communication Technologies was opened on Monday June 22, and continued till June 25. The conference was held at the initiative of the Tunisian Government represented by the Ministry of Communication Technologies (the National Digital certification Agency (ANCE)) in partnership with the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), examined ways of promoting computer security as well as boosting Crypto research in Africa. "AfricaCrypt 2009" was opened by Mrs Lamia Cheffai Sghaier, the Secretary of State in charge of Information Technologies, Internet and Open Source Software. There were about 160 participants from over 22 countries with. The Local participation had the biggest share with France (13). Tow from Japan and one from India had the furthest travels.

The social program included two afternoons: Tuesday, 23 June, 2009: Excursion to the archeological site of Carthage and Sidi BouSaid Medina and on Thursday 25 June, 2009 after the closure remarks and Lunch: Excursion to Tunis Medina and National Bardo Museum.

The gala dinner was held on Wednesday 24 June 2009 at one of the restaurants of the main conference hotel.

AfricaCrypt2009 conference registration fee (Eur350) was all inclusive. It included participation in the technical program as well as a copy of the conference proceeding, published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (LNCS 5580) and was available at the conference. It included also transport from Carthage International Airport to hotels and vice versa, transport between hotels and venue in addition to lunches, coffee-breaks, gala dinner and participation to AfricaCrypt2009 cultural program. The "Tunisair" Airline Company had sponsored a 50% reduction to economic class tickets for AfricaCrypt-2009 participants.

The conference organizers are grateful for the support of the Program Committee Chair, Professor Bart Preneel, all program members and the invited speakers: Prof. Ueli Maurer from ETH Zurich, Prof. Nigel Smart from the University of Bristol and Prof. Antoine Joux from the University of Versailles. They are also grateful for the support of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI), the National Frequencies Agency (ANF), the Tunisian Post Office, Stonesoft, the International Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics (CIMPA), the National Agency for Computer Security (ANSI), Elghazala Techno Park of Communication Technologies, the Research and Studies, Telecommunications Center (CERT), the Center of Information, Training, Documentation, and Studies in Communication, Technologies (CIFOD'COM), the National Center of Computer Science (CNI), Tunisie Micro Informatique (TMI) and the "Tunisair" Airline.

Programme chair was Bart Preneel, General chair was Sami Ghazali, co-chair Sami Omar.

Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC 2009) , August 13-14, 2009, Calgary, Canada


The 16th Workshop on Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC 2009) was held at the University of Calgary, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada from August 13 to 14, 2009. There were 74 participants from 19 countries.

We had 86 submissions, one of which was withdrawn. The average quality was very high, making the task of selecting a program very challenging. We accepted 28 papers. We had 10 papers on hash functions, of course because of the NIST competition. The remaining papers were about block and stream ciphers, public key schemes, implementation, and privacy-enhancing cryptographic systems.

The proceedings will be published by Springer as volume 5986 of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. We expect that they will be available early December 2009.

The conference organizers gratefully acknowledge the Faculty of Science and Department of Computer Science of the University of Calgary, the University of Calgary University Research Grants Committee, the informatics Circle of Research Excellence (iCORE), the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS), and Microsoft Research for their generous financial support.

Co-chairs were Michael J. Jacobson, Jr., Vincent Rijmen, and Rei Safavi-Naini.

List of books for review

If you are interested in reviewing such a book, please contact the newsletter editor through newsletter at iacr dot org.
First check here if your book is already under review.

Taylor & Francis

Springer

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