IACR Newsletter
The newsletter of the International Association for Cryptologic Research .Vol. 22, No. 2, Winter 2005.
Contents
- 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
- RSS News feed available for the IACR ePrint archive
- Top Downloads from the Cryptology ePrint Archive
- Open Positions in Cryptology
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
- Asiacrypt 2005 , ( mirror ), December 4-8, 2005, Taj Coromandel, Chennai, India.
- Eurocrypt 2006 , May 28-June 1, St. Petersburg, Russia.
- Crypto 2006 , August 20-24, 2006, Santa Barbara, California, USA
-
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
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Events In Cooperation with IACR
- 3rd International IEEE Security in Storage Workshop (SISW05), December 13, 2005, San Francisco, CA, USA
- The 4th International Conference on Cryptology and Network Security (CANS 2005), December 14-16, 2005, Fujian, China.
- 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.
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
A new “partial” key recovery attacks against the RMAC block cipher based Message Authentication Code scheme are described.
- Analysis and Design of Distributed Key Distribution Centers , Carlo Blundo and Paolo D’Arco
This paper describes Distributed Key Distribution Centers in terms of information theory a model, and presents lower bounds for the resources needed to set up and manage a distributed center.
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 .
Top downloads from the Cryptology ePrint Archive
The top six downloads from the ePrint archive for the period May 18th through November 22, 2005 are listed here. 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.
Open positions in Cryptology
Current announcements on the IACR Website for Open Positions in Cryptology .
- University of Waterloo
- University College London
- Indiana University
- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
- Stevens Institute of Technology
- Université catholique de Louvain
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