Information about Electronic Submissions for

CRYPTO 2001

Last update: January 22, 2001

See the Call for Papers for general submission guidelines. The actual submission server is here. (this link will be intermittent until February 1).

Deadline: February 12, 2001, 17:00 EST.

Contents

Introduction

This is a working document describing the electronic submission procedure for CRYPTO 2001. All electronic submissions must be submitted through the web interface (no email or ftp); they must be in printable PostScript form and arrive by February 12, 2001, 17:00 EST. The server will begin operation on February 01, 2001. Until that time, links to the server software may be intermittent. The top-level server page is here.

Questions about the submission process may be sent to joe@pnylab.com.

The electronic submission is an experimental software. To upload your submission, you will need to use a RFC 1867-compliant browser. Netscape 3.0 (or later) and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 (or later) are RFC 1867-compliant. Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 requires a special file upload add-on (patch) available at www.download.com (search for upload patch). Part of the software is taken from the electronic submission software developed by Sam Rebelsky and SIGACT's Electronic Publishing Board. However, because of the experimental nature of the software, and because "good" postscript files can fail to print on "good" postscript printers, the program committee cannot assume responsiblity for technical problems, although we will do our best to make sure that no such problems occur. For this reason we request that you submit your paper as early as possible.

In addition, please keep in mind the following:

Formatting the Paper

To submit your paper electronically, you must convert your paper into PostScript, conforming to the Document Structuring Conventions (DSC)using letter sized pages. Pages should appear in ascending order. You should use standard postscript fonts (not every printer has, for example, Transylvania-Gothic-Bold).

A4 paper size is not allowed!

It does not suffice that your text fit on the appropriate area: If your PostScript file specifies A4 format (you can usually check this yourself by looking at the header of the file) it cause difficulties for many American printers. It is also important that your file conform to the document structuring conventions, or your paper may not be processed correctly.

If you use dvips, the appropriate command is 

dvips -t letter
If you use another mechanism for generating PostScript, please contact your technical support people.

The submissions server has a test print feature for testing papers for printability. We strongly recommend using it, especially if you have not used this software before or are using a new document preparation package. However, the submissions server can not detect papers that are legal postscript but violate the DSC conventions. Also, this test service will be turned off 24 hours before the deadline to reduce the load on the server during the critical period.

Anonymity

Your submission should have no identifying information. It is therefore crucial that when you submit you paper, you include proper contact information. The contact field should have one valid email address.

Does my postscript file conform to the document structuring conventions?

Our experience is that most, but not all postscript files produced today conform to the document structuring conventions (DSC). DSC files have header information specifying such information as the number of pages, the ordering of the pages and the paper size (and many other optional comments as well). Here is an example of the beginning of such a header: 
%!PS-Adobe-2.0
%%Creator: dvipsk 5.58f Copyright 1986, 1994 Radical Eye Software
%%Title: coloring.dvi
%%Pages: 15
%%PageOrder: Ascend
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 612 792
%%DocumentPaperSizes: letter
%%EndComments
%DVIPSCommandLine: /usr/local/bin/dvips coloring.dvi -o coloring.ps -t
%+ letter
....
Pages begin with a line of the form 
%%Page:...
If your paper looks like this, you are probably in good shape. To be sure, contact your systems support person. A fuller description of these conventions is given in the PostScript Language Reference Manual (second edition), Appendix G.

If your postscript file is not DSC compliant, do NOT attempt to manually make it compliant by inserting lines from the example! Ask your systems support person for help. Unfortunately, we do not have the resources to help you ourselves.

Basic Procedure

Submission

The electronic submission procedure involves filling out a Submission Form through the web interface. The form has the following fields:

Title:title of document.
Authors:list of authors separated by "and".
Contact:e-mail address of a contact person for this paper.
Paper:Full pathname of the file to be uploaded. You can use the browse button to help select the file.

The contents of the authors and contacts fields will be used in processing the documents, but will not be read by the program committee. Also, note that any newline character encountered in these entries will be ignored.

It is possible to practice submitting a paper before doing the real submission. Simply fill out all the fields and submit the form. You will receive an MD5 receipt and a unique id for the submission. Then, you can upload as many revisions as you would like using the given unique id.

Here is an example of an email you will get after your submission is received. 

From: joe@pnylab.com Thu Jan  8 19:18:41 2000
To: ron@nostalgia.mit.edu
Subject: Submission of "on encryption" to CRYPTO 2001 Conference Received

Your submission has been received. Its bookkeeping information is as follows:

Title:          on encryption
Contact Person: ron@nostalgia.mit.edu
Authors:        Ronald Rivest
Unique ID:      encryption.ps.38850975d19b8
Receipt:        8e86288eeeed8dcf4fb5ef76c7f22d20

Please keep this information for future reference.

Revision

The procedure for electronically submitting a revision through a Revision Form is similar to the procedure described earlier for submission. The difference is that you must supply a Unique ID that was sent to you via email after we receive your original submission. The rest of the fields are the same and are optional. Once a revision is received, an email notification will be sent to the specified contact person. If this email address is different from the previous contact, a notification will also be sent to the previous contact email address.

Unique ID:Unique ID of this submission.This string is sent to you after we receive your submission. Later revisions of the submission must be accompanied by this string.
Title:title of document.
Authors:list of authors separated by "and".
Contact:e-mail address of a contact person for this paper.
Paper:Full pathname of the file to be uploaded. You can use the browse button to help select the file.

Here is an example of an email you will get after your revision is received. 

From: joe@pnylab.com Thu Sep  8 19:18:41 1994
To: ron@nostalgia.mit.edu
Subject: Revision of "on encryption" to CRYPTO 2001 Conference Received

Your submission has been received. Its bookkeeping information is as follows:

Title:          on encryption
Contact Person: ron@nostalgia.mit.edu
Authors:        Ronald Rivest
Unique ID:      encryption.ps.38850975d19b8
Receipt:        8e86288eeeed8dcf4fb5ef76c7f22d20

Please keep this information for future reference.

Withdrawal

One can withdraw a previously submitted paper using a Withdrawal Form. You must supply at least the unique id of the paper.

Unique ID:Unique ID of this submission.This string is sent to you after we receive your submission. Later revisions of the submission must be accompanied by this string.
Title:title of document.
Authors:list of authors separated by "and".

A notification of withdrawal will be sent via email to the contact person.

Test PostScript File

It is possible to test printability of your PostScript file. The server will return a message regarding the success or failure of the printing process. However, the server does not test for full compliance with the submission guidelines. Hence, a submission may pass this test and still be rejected without consideration of its merits.

We have also found that some PostScript successfully passes through the testing process, but is not printable. For example, FrameMaker(tm) generates PostScript(tm) that is only printable on a particular size of paper (if generated for A4, it will not print on letter, and vice versa). All papers must be generated for letter-sized paper. To test a PostScript file, simply fill out the name of the file in the Test Form.

So you want to use Microsoft Word?

The server, and most of the people it was created by and designed for, work in a Unix environment. Not surprisingly, those working in a Microsoft Windows environment have had more trouble interfacing with the server. The problems are twofold: obtaining a properly formatted PostScript file and sending it to the server.

First, many Windows-based programs do not seem to know how to output PostScript themselves, but allow you to do so indirectly by printing the file, and using the print options. Here is one possible way to get a PostScript output from Microsoft Word.

Once you have a good postscript file, you have to get it safely away from your Windows platform before it is corrupted. It is recommended that you test printability well before the deadline with a preliminary version of your file and be prepared to mail in a paper copy if you can't get it to work.

(return to the table of contents)

Credits

The software used to manage electronic submission to CRYPTO 2001 is a collection of PHP scripts written by Chanathip Namprempre (cnamprem@cs.ucsd.edu) and some perl scripts written by Sam Rebelsky and SIGACT's Electronic Publishing Board. The present instruction document was greatly based on the prototype help file which accompanies the system and on the respective document which was used for WDAG'97. We gratefully acknowledge all their help.
PostScript is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T. Netscape is a registered trademark of Netscape Corporation. Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Internet Explorer are registered trademarks of Microsoft.

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