The 42nd Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Eurocrypt 2023, was held in Lyon, France between April 23--27. The conference had a record number of 415 submissions, out of which 109 were accepted.
Preparation for the academic aspects of the conference started in earnest well over a year ago, with the selection of a program committee, consisting of 79 regular members and six area chairs. The area chairs played an important part in enabling a high-quality review process; their role was expanded considerably from last year and, for the first time, properly formalized. Each area chair was in charge of moderating the discussions of the papers assigned under their area, guiding PC members and reviewers to consensus where possible, and helping us in making final decisions. We created six areas and assigned the following area chairs: Ran Canetti for Theoretical Foundations; Rosario Gennaro for Public Key Primitives with Advanced Functionalities; Tibor Jager for Classic Public Key Cryptography; Marc Joye for Secure and Efficient Implementation, Cryptographic Engineering, and Real-World Cryptography; Gregor Leander for Symmetric Cryptology; and finally Arpita Patra for Multi-Party Computation and Zero-Knowledge.
Prior to the submission deadline, PC members were induced into the reviewing process; for this purpose we created a slide deck that explained what we expected from everyone involved in the process and how PC members could use the reviewing system (HotCRP) used by us. An important aspect of the reviewing process is the reviewing form, which we modified based on the Crypto'22 form as designed by Yevgeniy Dodis and Tom Shrimpton. As is customary for IACR general conferences, the reviewing process is two-sided anonymous.
Out of the 415 submissions, four were desk rejected due to violations of the Call for Paper (non-anonymous submission or significant deviations from the submission format). For the remaining submissions, the review process proceeded in two stages. In the first stage, every paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers. For 109 papers a clear, negative consensus emerged and an early reject decision was reached and communicated to the authors on the 8th of December 2022. This initial phase of early rejections allowed the program committee to concentrate on the delicate task of selecting a program amongst the more promising submissions, while simultaneously offering the authors of the rejected papers the opportunity to take advantage of the early, full feedback to improve their work for a future occasion.
The remaining 302 papers progressed to an interactive discussion phase, which was open for two weeks (ending slightly before the Christmas break). During this period, the authors had access to their reviews (apart from some PC only fields) and were asked to address questions and requests for clarifications explicitly formulated in the reviews. It gave authors and reviewers the opportunity to communicate directly (yet anonymously) with each other during several rounds of interaction. For some papers, the multiple rounds helped in clarifying both the reviewers' questions and the authors' responses. For a smaller subset of papers, a second interactive discussion phase took place in the beginning of January allowing authors to respond to new, relevant insights by the PC. Eventually, 109 papers were selected for the program.
The best paper award was granted to the paper "An Efficient Key Recovery Attack on SIDH" by Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru for presenting the first efficient key recovery attack against the Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman (SIDH) problem. Two further, related papers were invited to the Journal of Cryptology: "Breaking SIDH in Polynomial Time" by Damien Robert and "A direct key recovery attack on SIDH" by Luciano Maino, Chloe Martindale, Lorenz Panny, Giacomo Pope and Benjamin Wesolowski.
Accepted papers written exclusively by researchers who were within four years of PhD graduation at the time of submission, were eligible for the Early Career Best Paper Award. There were a number of strong candidates and the paper "Worst-Case Subexponential Attacks on PRGs of Constant Degree or Constant Locality" by Akin Ünal has been awarded this honor.
The program further included two invited talks: Guy Rothblum opened the program with his talk on "Indistinguishable Predictions and Multi-Group Fair Learning" (an extended abstract of his talk appears in these proceedings) and later during the conference, Vadim Lyubashevsky gave a talk on "Lattice Cryptography: What happened and what's next".
First and foremost, we would like to thank Kevin McCurley and Kay McKelly for their tireless efforts in the background, making the whole process so much smoother for us to run. Thanks also to our previous co-chairs Orr Dunkelman, Stefan Dziembowski, Yevgeniy Dodis, Thomas Shrimpton, Shweta Agrawal and Dongdai Lin for sharing the lessons they learned and allowing us to build on their foundations. We thank Guy and Vadim for accepting to give two excellent invited talks. Of course, no program can be selected without submissions, so we thank both the authors of accepted papers, as well as those whose papers did not make it (we sincerely hope that, notwithstanding the disappointing outcome, you found the reviews and interaction constructive). The reviewing was led by our PC members, who often engaged expert sub reviewers to write high-quality, insightful reviews and engage directly in the discussions, and we are grateful to both our PC members and the subreviewers. As the IACR's general conferences grow from year on year, a very special thank you to our area chairs, our job would frankly not have been possible without Ran, Rosario, Tibor, Marc, Gregor, and Arpita's tireless efforts leading the individual papers' discussions. And, last but not least, we would like to thank the general chairs: Damien Stehlé, Alain Passelègue, and Benjamin Wesolowski who worked very hard to make this conference happen.
April 2023 Carmit Hazay