Membership meeting - Crypto 2020 Wednesday August 19, 2020 (Supporting slides are available on the IACR website.) President Michel Abdalla opened the virtual membership meeting at 21h49 CET where around 140 virtual participants are present, giving a brief overview of the IACR, its conference/workshops, etc. He reminded the membership that three of the directors have terms expiring this year, and encourages members to run for office. The President explains that the annual IACR Distinguished Lecture is awarded by the IACR to people who have made important contributions to cryptology research. The lecture alternates from Eurocrypt to Crypto to Asiacrypt. The IACR Distinguished Lecture for 2021 (Asiacrypt) is awarded to Andrew Yao. The President recalls the call for nominations for IACR Fellows: outstanding IACR members, recognized for technical and professional contributions. Test-of-time award, this award is given yearly for each one of the three IACR General Conferences (Eurocrypt, Crypto, and Asiacrypt) for a paper with a lasting impact on the field. The selected 3 papers for 2020 are: * Fuzzy Identity-Based Encryption - Amit Sahai, Brent Waters - Eurocrypt 2005 * Finding collisions in the full SHA-1 - Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, Hongbo Yu - Crypto 2005 * Discrete-Log-Based Signatures May Not Be Equivalent to Discrete Log - Pascal Paillier, Damien Vergnaud - Asiacrypt 2005 Treasurer Brian LaMacchia gave a report summarizing the IACR's finances. He highlighted the fact that the IACR has a robust financial position. The IACR has sufficient reserves to weather COVID-19. The Crypto 2020 conference attendance is currently at 1234: due to the virtual conferences we have seen a significant increase in participation. The Treasurer shows an inflation-adjusted figure for the three General Conference registration fees. This highlights that the current registration fees have remained quite stable. The treasurer recommends to not change the current IACR membership fee. Abdalla thanks LaMacchia for his continued hard work. Membership Secretary Douglas Stebila gave a report and showed that membership has increased significantly in 2020 to a record number of 2471. He also presented a comparison of attendance, new members, number of countries and attendees outside Europe & North America between online versus in-person conferences. Abdalla thanked Stebila for his continued hard work. The current topics discussed in the Board are related to the COVID-19 impact, virtual conference implementation, parallel co-chairs, and the creation of a new IACR journal. The President opens the floor for discussion. Micciancio wonders if we should consider more virtual crypto options in the future even when in-persons meetings are possible? The President explains that the Board has been considering hybrid conferences where there is physical and virtual attendance. One of the benefits is that this allows for more participation. In normal times this would be a great addition. McCurley states that he shared a proposal in the chat. One of the benefits of virtual conferences is that the participant can watch whenever he/she wants. There might be fragmentation due to more conferences. He suggests to run the area conferences in parallel to the generic conferences (which rotate). This means, however, that multiple issues are coming together: virtual conferences, new journal proposal, digital publishing. McCurley realizes this is complex and might be controversial. Lange comments that this is an interesting view. As a member she views herself to be more part of the area conferences than the main conferences. McCurley explains that the proposal is to co-locate the two together. Halevi agrees with Lange about any potential impact on the area conferences. The idea of co-locating is positive, however this should not be the default and doesn't necessarily have to be with an IACR event. Benaloh remarks that the virtual events are great and that the organizers for their tremendous work. However, virtual events do not replace the physical events. Couldn't we organize a permanent virtual event next to the physical ones? Kelsey agrees with Benaloh. There are huge advantages of physical conferences over virtual ones: talk to and meet people. Virtual attendance at a lower cost might be a great alternative for the hybrid approach. McKelly remarks that the idea of running virtual conference was never to replace the physical conferences. The President highlights that we all travel a lot to all these different events. It would be beneficial to improve co-location. Replacing the area conferences altogether would be hard. However, there is a lot of room for improvement. The virtual conferences reach more people and are more inclusive. We should take these ideas (even if they are radical) into account. McCurley wonders how to add an online component to offline conferences. How to facilitate interaction between people who are there physically and virtually? Dodis asks why not make all conferences hybrid? Can we agree on this right away in this Membership meeting? The President states that he will definitely try to realize this. McCurley remarks that it might be weird if only the speakers show up to these hybrid events. Halevi suggests to experiment and see if this is likely to happen. Kakvi suggests that for this potential annual virtual conference we might solely have invited talks and not peer-reviewed articles to make it more interesting for a wider audience. Benaloh thinks this is an interesting alternative. Yung highlights that it is easy to suggest lots of new ideas. However, they potentially have implications for the entire community. We need to take an holistic approach and be careful about what and how to implement this. The President states that we will listen to all ideas and handle them in a responsible way. McCurley wants to highlight that for hybrid events we need very good internet at the physical venue: something which is not always the case. Moreover, how do we plan to handle pre-recorded presentations such as we are currently doing for the virtual events? The President states that we don't have an answer to these questions at this moment. The meeting was closed at 23h05 CET.