PKC Test of Time Award
The Public Key Cryptography conference (PKC) Test of Time Award recognizes outstanding papers that have made a significant contribution to the theory and practice of public key cryptography, generally with influence either on foundations or on the practice of the field. The inaugural PKC Test of Time Award was given at PKC 2019 for papers published in PKC's initial years (the late 1990s to early 2000s).
Award Recipients
2026
Implicit Factoring: On Polynomial Time Factoring Given Only an Implicit Hint by Alexander Ma and Maike Ritzenhofen. This paper was published in PKC 2009.
2025
Two awards were given in 2025, for papers published in PKC 2009.
Signing a Linear Subspace: Signature Schemes for Network Coding by Dan Boneh, David Freeman, Jonathan Katz, and Brent Waters.
An Accumulator Based on Bilinear Maps and Efficient Revocation for Anonymous Credentials by Jan Camenisch, Markulf Kohlweiss, and Claudio Soriente.
2024
Traceable Ring Signature by Eiichiro Fujisaki and Koutarou Suzuki. This paper was published in PKC 2007.
2023
The 2023 PKC Test of Time award ceremony is available on Youtube.
Unidirectional chosen-ciphertext secure proxy re-encryption by Benoît Libert and Damien Vergnaud. This paper was published in PKC 2008.
2022
Two awards were given in 2022, for papers published in PKC 2005-2006.
Password-Based Authenticated Key Exchange in the Three-Party Setting by Michel Abdalla, Pierre-Alain Fouque, and David Pointcheval. This paper was published in PKC 2005.
Curve25519: New Diffie-Hellman Speed Records by Daniel J. Bernstein. This paper was published in PKC 2006.
2021
The 2021 PKC Test of Time award ceremony is available on Youtube. Three awards were given in 2021, for papers published in PKC 2003-2005.
An Identity-Based Signature from Gap Diffie-Hellman Groups by Jae Choon Cha and Jung Hee Cheon. This paper was published in PKC 2003.
An Efficient Signature Scheme from Bilinear Pairings and Its Applications by Fangguo Zhang, Reihaneh Safavi-Naini, and Willy Susilo. This paper was published in PKC 2004.
A Verifiable Random Function with Short Proofs and Keys by Yevgeniy Dodis and Aleksandr Yampolskiy. This paper was published in PKC 2005.
2020
The 2020 PKC Test of Time award ceremony is available on Youtube. Three awards were given in 2020, for papers published in PKC 1998-2003.
On the Security of ElGamal Based Encryption by Yiannis Tsiounis and Moti Yung. This paper was published in PKC 1998.
A Generalisation, a Simplification and Some Applications of Paillier's Probabilistic Public-Key System by Ivan Damgård and Mads Jurik. This paper was published in PKC 2001.
Threshold Signatures, Multisignatures and Blind Signatures based on the Gap-Diffie-Hellman-Group Signature Scheme by Alexandra Boldyreva. This paper was published in PKC 2003.
2019
The PKC Test of Time Award is established. Three awards were given in 2019, for papers published in PKC 1999-2001.
How to Enhance the Security of Public-Key Encryption at Minimum Cost by Eiichiro Fujisaki and Tatsuaki Okamoto. This paper was published in PKC 1999.
Selecting Cryptographic key Sizes by Arjen K. Lenstra and Eric R. Verheul. This paper was published in PKC 2000, then later in the Journal of Cryptography 2000.
The Gap-Problems: A New Class of Problems for the Security of Cryptographic Schemes by Tatsuaki Okamoto and David Pointcheval. This paper was published in PKC 2001.
Award committee & rules
This award is given annually during the PKC conference. The recipient papers are selected by a committee consisting of five members. In PKC Year X, the award committee is generally expected to select one or two papers each year from among those published in PKC years X-17, X-16, and X-15. During the first three years, since the award retrospectively recognized papers from the early years of the conference, papers were selected across a broader range of years.
The award committee is expected to select 1-2 papers each year. This year, with the assistance of the PKC 2026 program committee, five committee members participated in examining papers from several past conferences.