Membership meeting Wednesday August 18, 2010 (Supporting slides with additional details may be available on the IACR website.) President Bart Preneel opened the meeting at 5:25 pm, giving a brief overview of the IACR, its conference/workshops, etc. He reminded the membership that three of the directors and all of the elected officers have terms expiring this year, and encouraged members to run for office. Treasurer Helena Handschuh gave a report summarizing the IACR's finances. She highlighted the fact that despite the economic crisis, the IACR has a strong financial position. We continue to enjoy strong support from several sponsoring organizations. The IACR targets break-even on its events, and tries to keep the overhead budget below 2%. She reminded the membership that starting with FSE'11 the membership fee (for 2012) will be reduced from $88 to $44 for standard members, and from $70 to $35 for student members. Preneel thanked Handschuh for her continued hard work. Preneel gave a report on the behalf of Membership secretary Shai Halevi. Overall, membership is steadily increasing. Preneel also mentioned our online services, in particular the cryptoDB and archive services. He thanked Halevi for his hard work. Preneel then gave a list of the upcoming IACR conferences and workshops. He reminded the membership of the new junior/senior PC chair policy, which will first be implemented at Eurocrypt'11. On behalf of EiC Franklin, Preneel encouraged members to send their best work to the Journal of Cryptology. He reminded the membership of the upcoming focus issue on applied cryptography. Preneel gave a very brief report on behalf of Newsletter editor Christopher Wolf, highlighting the number of new ideas that Wolf has for the newsletter. He highlighted the new 'book review' portion of the newsletter. He noted that the newsletter plans to expand to include a list of Ph.D. theses in cryptography. Preneel quickly reviewed the IACR Fellows process, and noted that in 2010 we have five new fellows. He thanked the fellows committee for their work. Fellows committee chair Ron Rivest asked that members please nominate candidates for fellowship. General Chair Zulfikar Ramzan was presented with a certificate of appreciation for his excellent running of Crypto'10. Program Chair Tal Rabin also received a certificate for delivering an excellent technical program. Preneel reminded the audience that we have and IACR reading room, which provides free electronic access to all past proceedings of our conferences, workshops and the journal. This service is provided by Springer. There is a small delay between actual publication and availability in the reading room. He also reminded the audience that the IACR provides an archive, and that there is currently a two-year delay between the time proceedings are published by Springer and the time that the IACR can make these available in the archive. The board is lobbying Springer to reduce this delay. He mentioned that there are other publishing models under consideration for the future, in particular the Open Access model through Springer (which costs quite a bit of money) or other organizations (e.g. USENIX). He mentioned that Springer has made the generous offer to allow members to opt out of the paper copy of the Journal. This will save the IACR money, which eventually will be passed along to the membership as lower membership fees. Preneel gave a brief report on the current board activities. In particular: o He gave a summary of the board's progress (from 2008 until today) on the matter of e-voting. In 2008 the Board was given permission (by membership vote) to amend the bylaws so that they allow for e-voting. In 2009 Helios and Punchscan were invited to present to the board and organize a demo election. In 2010, there was a demo election with Helios. During the summer of 2010 issues identified during the demo election were resolved. Preneel thanked the Helios team, the e-voting committee of the IACR board, and Yvo Desmedt who has provided important input to the process. He read (and projected) a formal statement of the position of the board for approval by the membership. (Please see the BoD minutes or the membership meeting slides for the statement.) The statement is a modified version of the one that was approved by the membership at Eurocrypt'10. A member expressed concern over adoption of Helios, feeling that the level of rigor in the analysis provided by the Helios team is insufficient. He felt that the IACR was moving too fast to adopt. Another member expressed concern is that he was confused about whether or not his vote was counted during the demo. E-voting committee member Josh Benaloh responded to this concern. He went on to point out some potential sources of error and explicit/implicit points at which the members instill trust in the returning officer in paper election. A member responded that e-voting schemes may solve some problems identified by Benaloh, but neglects other important ones. A member expressed concern about setting a precedent by adopting an e-voting mechanism. Moreover, he wondered if there is a clear protocol description for handling attacks and errors that are identified if Helios is adopted. Benaloh responded that this is indeed an important question, that at the moment there is no such protocol description, but that Helios and the board are committed to producing documents that will document lessons learned. Preneel asked for a vote on the motion contained in the statement: 71 for, 20 against, 8 abstentions. The membership passed the motion put forward in the statement. The floor was opened for discussion: A member asked if we could consider having fewer, larger events (say through colocation) with parallel tracks. Preneel responded that this is question under study by the board. A member expressed concern about the smaller workshops being subsumed by proposed, larger conferences. The meeting was adjourned at 6:10 pm.