International Association
for Cryptologic Research

6th International Conference on Information Theoretic Security (ICITS 2012)

ICITS 2012 was held from August 15 to 17, 2012 in Montréal (Canada). The organizing committee included Adam D. Smith (Program Chair), Jürg Wullschleger (General Chair), Alain Tapp, Claude Crépeau and Olivier Coutu.

It is a conference about all aspects of information-theoretic security. Its aim is to bring together researchers from all over the world from the areas of cryptography, information theory and quantum information. The conference was created as a successor of the “IEEE Information Theory Workshop on Theory and Practice in Information-Theoretic Security” on Awaji Island, Japan, and takes place every 18 month, alternating between Asia, Europe and North America. Previous ICITS conferences were held in Madrid (Spain), Calgary (Canada), Shizuoka (Japan) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands).

As in previous ICITS conferences, the plenary talks were given by the leading researchers in the field. This year, these talks were given by Serge Fehr (CWI Amsterdam), Patrick Hayden (McGill University), Negar Kiyavash (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Xin Li (University of Washington), Krzysztof Pietrzak (IST Austria) and Salil Vadhan (Harvard University).

The usual process for conferences in Computer Science is that all submitted papers first undergo a careful reviewing process, and all papers that are accepted are not only presented at the conference, but they also appear in the conference’s proceedings. Previous ICITS conferences also used this format, but it turned out not to be optimal for information theorists and physicists. For this years ICITS, the organizers therefore decided to make a special “workshop track,” in addition to the more standard “conference track,” where the speakers needed to submit only a one-page abstract which will appear in the proceedings. This new format with both a conference and a workshop track was a big success, both in quality and quantity, and having as additional track also increased the number of participants.

The ICITS 2013 will take place in Singapore, from November 28 to 30, 2013.