Membership Meeting Crypto 2005 Santa Barbara 17 August 2005 I.A.C.R. President Andy Clark convened the meeting at 17:05. The agenda had the following items: - About I.A.C.R. & Your Board - Membership & 2005 Election - Financial Report - Conferences & Workshops - Publications - I.A.C.R. Fellows - Current Board Activities - Open Discussion * About I.A.C.R. & Your Board Andy Clark introduced the services offered by the I.A.C.R.: journal, newsletter, eprint archive, website and conferences and workshops. I.A.C.R. is organizing three flagship conferences (Asiacrypt, Crypto, Eurocrypt) and four workshops (CHES, FSE, PKC and TCC); TCC - Theory of Cryptography Conference will be sponsored from 2006 onwards. * Membership & 2005 Election Introduction of the Board members. Clarification of membership of the I.A.C.R. Attendees to a conference or workshop in 2005 will be I.A.C.R. members for 2006. Elections: in the Fall 2005 elections three director posts are open; members are encouraged to consider running in the elections. The Board will also request the approval of a number of proposed changes to the bylaws. - The addition of a tighter rule for voting in the Board for Program Chairs: only the elected members of the Board will be allowed to vote; - Some reformatting for clarity. The 2006 Election Committee consists of Tom Berson, Josh Benaloh and Arjen Lenstra. * Financial Report Helena Handschuh (Treasurer) presented a brief financial report on 2004. The conferences were financially healthy; workshops have reached break-even. We expect a membership increase from CHES attendees. Cost savings are introduced by using electronic mailings and web-based registration. The I.A.C.R. funds as of December 31, 2004: total assets of US$651,000 with a surplus of US$441,000 taking into account outstanding expenses for 2004 and 2005. Greg Roses proposed a vote of thanks for Susan Langford, who did an excellent job as treasurer in the past years. General applause was received. * Conferences & Workshops Andy Clark thanked Crypto 2005 General Chair Stuart Haber and Program Chair Victor Shoup for their efforts and general applause was received. Victor Shoup gave a short presentation on the program committee statistics and thanked the program committee for their hard work. Upcoming conferences and workshops: Asiacrypt 2005 4-8 December Taj Coromandel Hotel, Chennai, India General Chair C. Pandu Rangan Program Chair Bimal Roy Eurocrypt 2006 28 May - 1 June St. Petersburg, Russia General Chair Anatoly Lebedev Program Chair Serge Vaudenay Crypto 2006 14-18 August UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA, USA General Chair Josh Benaloh Program Chair Cynthia Dwork Asiacrypt 2006 3-7 December, Shanghai, China General Chair Dingyi Pei Program Chair Xuejia Lai Eurocrypt 2007 Dates, around 20 May t.b.c., Barcelona, Spain General Chair Javier Lopez Program Chair Moni Naor I.A.C.R. Distinguished Lecture to be given by Jacques Stern Crypto 2007 August UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA, USA General Chair Markus Jakobsson Program Chair Alfred Menezes Asiacrypt 2007, 3-7 Dec 2007 Kuching, Sarawak, MALAYSIA General Chair Raphael Phan Program Chair Kaoru Kurosawa CHES 2005 29 August - September 1, Edinburgh, Scotland Program Chairs Berk Sunar Josyula Rao General Chair Colin Walter TCC 2006 5-7 March, New York, NY, USA General & Program Co-Chairs Shai Halevi Tal Rabin FSE 2006 15-17 March, Graz, Austria General Chair Vincent Rijmen Program Chair Matt Robshaw PKC 2006 24-26 April, New York, NY, USA General Chair Tal Malkin Program Chair Moti Yung * Publications Our flagship publication is the Journal of Cryptology, which is the premier journal in this field. It is published by Springer-Verlag and mailed to all I.A.C.R. members. The Editor-in-Chief is Ueli Maurer. Ueli solicits high quality papers for publication; he has agreed with Springer an increase in our page budget to reduce backlog. All issues of J. Cryptology are available on-line to members at http://link.springer.de. The user name and password were announced. By the end of 2005 all I.A.C.R. members will also have free electronic access to all past proceedings of our conferences and workshops. This access will be provided through individual logons to a new reading room that will contain all material published by Springer on which I.A.C.R. holds the copyright. Andy Clark expressed his thanks to Alfred Hofmann of Springer-Verlag for making this possible. David Chaum pointed out that the Plenum books with the proceedings of the first two Crypto conferences are out of print and copyright has been assigned to I.A.C.R. I.A.C.R. has a newsletter with three issues per year that is emailed to members and that is available at http://www.iacr.org/newsletter. Members are encouraged to submit input to newsletter@iacr.org * I.A.C.R. Fellows Three new I.A.C.R. Fellows have been appointed this year: Kevin McCurley, Gustavus (Gus) Simmons and Jacques Stern. Andy Clark explained how to nominate members (deadline: December 31) and listed the members of the Fellows selection committee as Ivan Damgård, Cynthia Dwork, Joan Feigenbaum, Hugo Krawczyk, and Michael Wiener. Further details: http://www.iacr.org/fellows/. * Current Board Activities - Getting to the bottom of the problems for overseas (in particular Chinese) researchers attending Crypto - Renegotiating our contract with UCSB for Crypto and Secretariat services; there will be a new contract with a larger fee for Crypto and a fixed contract for general support (including elections) and for handling special cases of the other conferences and workshops. This represent a slight net saving. - Expanding our financial systems to take multiple currencies. - Making the first materials available in our own archive. We have to take into account the contract with Springer, which gives Springer exclusivity for 3 years. * Open Discussion Gideon Yuval pointed out that individual interviews are typically the bottleneck for obtaining a visa. A member suggested to move Crypto outside the US, perhaps to Canada. This raises the issue whether this would make it very difficult if not impossible to return to UCSB later on. Kevin McCurley expressed the opinion that moving Crypto to Canada may not be a solution. Many countries where we hold workshops or conferences require visa applications long time in advance. A member commented that international graduate students in the US can have problems attending conferences outside the US. Whitfield Diffie suggested to arrange for video tapes or webcast from abroad in case presenters could not attend in person due to visa problems. The question was raised whether I.A.C.R. can help collect information for researchers to get a visa. I.A.C.R. will try to establish the time schedule and to provide information, but it cannot become a visa broker due to lack of resources. If there are issues w.r.t. visa, I.A.C.R. will inform members and make further representations as appropriate to fix the problem. It is also important to note that the US State Department will not comment on individual cases. Whitfield Diffie suggested that the most productive strategy is to join other organizations who are lobbying on this matter (ACM, IEEE, ..). Andy Clark responded that so far I.A.C.R. has worked with the USA Academy of Sciences. Stuart Haber announced that the rump session had been webcast and will be made available on-line; presenters will be asked to give permission to make their slides available. For next year a “dual” webcast of the rump session is planned with images of both the slides and the presenters. Stanislaw Jarecki suggested to collect slides for regular talks and to make these available on the conference website. Richard Schroeppel said that he believes that our current review process is broken and that we should think about ways to address this. A member answered that he did not agree that the current review process is broken. Whitfield Diffie asked why there was no longer a dinner associated with the rump session (which means we have returned to the status of 5-7 years ago). He expressed the opinion that the parties of Crypto are an important factor that contribute to its quality. Stuart Haber, the Crypto 2005 general chair responded that this was a deliberate choice, taking into account the costs; more in particular, the caterer in UCEN is not as good as the caterer for the other social events and it is more expensive. Ran Canetti expressed the opinion that it remains essential to distribute the Journal of Cryptology on paper (since this is still easier to browse than online publications). Hilarie Orman asked whether I.A.C.R. would be able to run cryptographic competitions. It was pointed out that I.A.C.R. is perhaps not the right organization to do this. A member suggested that I.A.C.R. distribute membership identification tokens. A member pointed out a bug on the I.A.C.R. webpages: if the date passes, the link to the event disappears. The Membership Meeting was adjourned at 18:03. Respectfully submitted Bart Preneel I.A.C.R. Vice President ================================================================================