President's Message

Dear Fellow Members of IACR.

This year sees the Association continuing to expand its promotion of research into cryptology into new areas with a variety of initiatives and activities.

Election

You will have seen from our last newsletter the results of the 2003 election. Nine candidates stood for the three open positions of Director. Those elected were Arjen Lenstra, Tom Berson and Lars Knudsen. My personal thanks go to them for standing for election and being elected to serve the membership. On that note, please remember that the Board is elected to serve the interests of the Association's members - all of the Board members' details are on our web site, and any of them will be happy to hear from you if you wish to discuss IACR matters.

Conferences

I was able to attend both Eurocrypt and Crypto in 2003. Both were very well organised and provided the usual high quality programme and stimulating environment for the discussion of research in the field of cryptology. Many of you will have attended our last sponsored conference of the year (Asiacrypt in Taipei). Although I was unable to attend, I was delighted that our Vice-President, Bart Preneel, was able to be there and represent the Board of IACR. He reported that the conference was well attended and well organised. Asiacrypt is a very important conference for IACR as it provides our members in the Asia Pacific areas with a natural focus for presenting their research and meeting other researchers in the field. Running three full conferences (Eurocrypt, Crypto and Asiacrypt) is a major undertaking for the Association. We rely heavily on each of the conference's General Chair and our Secretariat at UCSB to make sure that things run smoothly. You can all help that process by registering for our conferences well before the late payment deadline and save yourselves money in the process.

Workshops

As well as our three flagship conferences, IACR sponsors workshops in specific areas of cryptology. This year we are pleased to welcome CHES 2004 to our sponsored list. This list is now PKC, FSE and CHES. These are all important workshops that maintain a lower profile than the full conferences, but really do focus on their particular area of interest and provide an ideal forum for publication of leading edge research. I commend our workshops to you and encourage you to attend them if you can.

IACR Fellows

In 2002 we established the IACR Fellows Program to

"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."

I am pleased to report that the Fellows Selection Committee has served us well in selecting the first six IACR Fellows. Their identities and details of their citations are stated elsewhere in this Newsletter. I am looking forward to presenting each of them formally with their awards at the Eurocrypt 2004 banquet in Interlaken. I hope that many of you will take the opportunity to be there and join in the celebration.

I would like to thank the Fellows Selection Committee for their diligent work in selecting very worthy individuals to hold this title.

And Finally

As I prepare the initial working papers for our Board of Directors meeting in Interlaken I realise that the posts of President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer will all be up for election at the end of this year. It really feels a lot less than two years ago that you elected me to be your President.

In these two years we have accomplished a great deal with the sponsorship of our workshops, renegotiation of our publishing contract with Springer-Verlag and early work on our own archive and web servers. Mihir Bellare and Christian Cachin continue to maintain the ePrint Archive that is a positive wealth of material for the cryptologic community to digest and is planned to move to our own web servers in due course.

Notwithstanding all these efforts, there is still much to be done and I thank you all for your continued support. I look forward to seeing you in Interlaken in May, bringing you up to date on our plans and progress and sharing with you the presentations to our first IACR Fellows.

Uf Widerluege in Interlaken!

Andy Clark
President