IACR Newsletter
The newsletter of the [1]International Association for Cryptologic
Research.
Vol. 22, No. 2, Winter 2005.
Contents
* [2]President's Report
* [3]2005 Elections
* [4]Visas for IACR events
* [5]Nominations for IACR Fellow deadline approaching
* [6]Calendar of events in cryptology
* [7]Honoring Prof. Dr. Thomas Beth
* [8]Announcements
* [9]Journal of Cryptology September Issue
* [10]Top Downloads from the Cryptology ePrint Archive
* [11]RSS News feed available for the IACR ePrint archive
* [12]Open Positions in Cryptology
President's Report Dec 2005
Dear Colleagues
May I firstly thank you all for helping to make 2005 a good year
for IACR by attending our conferences and workshops. Although the
attendance at all three of our flagship conference reduced again
this year, this was broadly in line with with our expectations and
planning. Our workshops were well attended with both FSE and PKC
reporting substantial increases in attendance on previous years and
this shows a promising trend. In all cases our Program Chairs and
their Committees delivered strong technical programmes. As a result
IACR remains a strong organisation that is clearly focused on
advancing research in the field and supporting you, our members.
2005 was a busy year in many respects, some of the key events
included:
Eurocrypt
Eurocrypt 2005 was held in Aarhus, marking a return to Denmark
after 15 years. In 1990 the General Chair was Peter Landrock and
the Program Chair was Ivan Damgaard. This year Ivan moved roles to
be our General Chair with Ronald Cramer as Program Chair. The event
was most enjoyable, housed in Scandinavian Congress Center it
provided us with an excellent setting for the presentation of the
2005 IACR Fellowships. These were awarded to Kevin McCurley, Gus
Simmons and Jacques Stern all of whom joined us at the conference
to receive their felllowship plaques in person. This conference
seemed to mark the next stage of assaults on hash functions of
which we would hear more at Crypto.
Crypto
It was most unfortunate that the winner of the best paper at
Crypto, Professor Xiaoyun Wang, was not granted a visa to visit the
USA in time for Crypto. She was joint author of the first two
papers in the conference, both on efficiently finding collisions in
the SHA family of hash functions. On behalf of the Association I
spent some considerable time in email and telephone discussions
with the State Department of the USA firstly trying to "unblock"
the granting of her visa, and subsequently trying to establish how
to improve the protocol for overseas visitors (particularly
Chinese) to the USA. I am acutely aware that while I was contacting
the State Department there were many other senior and
highly-respected members of our community also applying pressure to
the US Government to resolve the situation. Unfortunately we were
unsuccessful and Professor Wang could not attend Crypto. It seems
clear that IACR and its members pressure is insufficient to speed
up the processing of our conference delegates' visa applications -
at least we now know how the protocol works and we should be able
to guide delegates and authors more proactively in the future, but
this situation remains one that we need to keep a careful eye on.
During the course of Crypto, we also learned of the death of Thomas
Beth who passed away early in the morning of Wednesday, August 17
at the age of 55. Thomas organised the meeting in Burg Feuerstein
in 1982 that was to lead to the series of conferences now known as
"Eurocrypt". His passing means that the Association has lost a
great character and a great researcher and pioneer.
But of course Crypto was not dominated by sadness, and the
conference was host to Ralph Merkle's IACR Distinguished Lecture -
and one that provided a unique insight into both early
cryptographic history and the emergence of nanotechnology - only
someone of Ralph's capabilities could have presented those two
topics seamlessly in a single lecture!
At our membership meeting I was able to announce that I had reached
an agreement with Alfed Hoffmann of Springer-Verlag that they would
provide all our membership with free online access to all our
publications - this produced rapturous applause from the meeting. I
report on this matter later in this report.
Asiacrypt
This year Asiacrypt was held in India for the first time. The IACR
was represented by our Vice-President Bart Preneel who is no
stranger to the venue, Chennai. I was particularly saddened not to
be able to attend (I have never been to India) and I understand
that the scientific programme was of high quality and everything
worked smoothly.
My Board colleagues report that our General Chair, Pandu Rangan
faced many difficult challenges - there was a monsoon. Chennai was
hard-hit, with 24 cm of rain in 24 hours. There was water in the
streets, knee-deep in places, but this did not dent his
organisational skills. One of our invited speakers could not attend
- again no problem. Then the conference hotel was occupied by the
India and Sri Lanka cricket sides, who had their match rained out
for three of the five days. The lobby was full of fans and
policemen. No problem. Then on the last day the conference venue
was preempted by Bill Gates and a bunch of ministers, with all the
attendant security cordons, so we had to switch to a nearby hotel.
Again, no problem. All in all a very impressive performance - well
done Pandu Rangan! Let's hope that our next Asiacrypts will be less
eventful for the organisers.
TCC Conference
The Board of IACR is pleased to announce that the The Theory of
Cryptology Conference is now an IACR sponsored event and is
officially adopted within our workshop series of events.
Election
The IACR election was held towards the end of the year with the
results being extremely close - we welcome Yvo Desmedt, Stuart
Haber and Antoine Joux to the Board for 2006 and bid a fond
farewell to Ed Dawson, Jean-Jacques Quisquater and Rebecca Wright.
Each of these departing individuals has contributed a great deal to
the IACR in the past years and, on your behalf, I thank them for
their efforts and continued support of our Association.
Online Access to Publications
Our relationship with Springer-Verlag who publishes both our
Proceedings and our Journal remains strong and mutually beneficial.
The most significant event that I am delighted to report is that
Springer has now implemented a "Reading Room" dedicated to all IACR
Conference and Workshop Proceedings. Currently the software is in
the final stages of beta testing and you will all hear from our
Membership Secretary early in the New Year when it goes live.
In closing this report, it only remains for me to thank you all for
your continued interest and support for our Association - it is
through you that IACR remains the premier organisation for
cryptology in the world - thankyou.
Andy Clark
IACR President
December 2005
2005 elections
The 2005 election is now complete. Five candidates stood for the
three open positions of Director. The three candidates with the
highest number of votes were elected. These new directors whose
terms will expire on 31 December 2008 are:
* Yvo Desmedt
* Stuart Haber
* Antoine Joux
The Revision of the [13]bylaws also passed with 170 in favor, 45
against.
More information on this year's election is [14]available here.
Visas for IACR events
The issue of Visas to attend IACR events has become a significant
issue. Both the next EUROCRYPT in St. Petersburg, Russia and CRYPTO
in Santa Barbara, CA, USA require Visas for many to attend.
For information regarding obtaining a Russian visa, there are web
sites for the Russian Consulates in [15]UK and [16]France. Note
that the [17]form for US and non-US citizens is different.
Information on the US visas can be found [18]here, The time to
obtain a US visa is variable, and may involve a visit to the
Consulate for an interview. This has taken over 3 months for some
individuals in the past. It is advisable to submit Visa
applications as soon as possible to avoid last minute problems.
Nominations for IACR Fellow
We hope that you will consider devoting some of your time and
effort to nominating or endorsing an IACR-Fellow candidate. IACR
members can nominate or endorse other IACR members for this
prestigious position. Nominations and endorsements are due on
December 31, 2005. More information can be found [19]here.
Calendar of IACR events
* [20]IACR Conferences
+ [21]Eurocrypt 2006, May 28-June 1, St. Petersburg, Russia.
+ [22]Crypto 2006, August 20-24, 2006, Santa Barbara,
California, USA.
+ [23]Asiacrypt 2006, December 3-7, Shanghai, China.
* [24]IACR Workshops
+ [25]The third Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC'06),
March 5-7, New York, USA.
+ [26]International Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public
Key Cryptography (PKC 2006), April 24-26, New York City, USA.
+ [27]Fast Software Encryption (FSE 2006), March 15-17, 2006,
Graz, Austria
+ [28]Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems,
CHES 2006, October 10-13, 2006, Yokohama, Japan.
* Events In Cooperation with IACR
+ [29]2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 21-24,
2006, Berkeley, USA.
+ [30]Third Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, July 2006,
Silicon Valley, California, USA.
* [31]Complete Calendar of Cryptology Workshop
Honoring Prof. Dr. Thomas Beth
Our Association has lost a great character and a great pioneer. The
IACR president has written a brief note [32]honoring the late Prof.
Dr. Thomas Beth.
Announcements
* Some of the rump session presentations and videos are now
[33]available.
* IACR has now implemented a policy on [34]irregular submissions.
* [35]The Theory of Cryptology Conference is now an IACR sponsored
event.
* [36]2005 IACR Fellows added to the distinguished list of IACR
fellows
Journal of Cryptology
[37]September 2005 issue of the Journal of Cryptology is available
to IACR members. The user-id and password for IACR members can be
retrieved [38]here.
* [39]Cryptanalysis of Skipjack Reduced to 31 Rounds Using
Impossible Differentials, Eli Biham, Alex Biryukov, Adi Shamir
Presents a cryptanalytic technique, based on impossible
differentials, to show that recovering keys of Skipjack reduced
from 32 to 31 rounds can be performed faster than exhaustive
search.
* [40]Secure Classical Bit Commitment Using Fixed Capacity
Communication Channels, Adrian Kent
If mutually mistrustful parties A and B control two or more
appropriately located sites, special relativity can be used to
guarantee that a pair of messages exchanged by A and B are
independent.
* [41]Polynomial and Normal Bases for Finite Fields, Joachim Gathen
and Michael Nöcker
Discusses two different ways to speed up exponentiation in
nonprime finite fields: reduction of the total number of
operations, and fast computation of a single operation.
* [42]The Complexity of Certain Multi-Exponentiation Techniques in
Cryptography, Roberto M. Avanzi
Describes, analyzes and compares some combinations of
multi-exponentiation algorithms with representations of the
exponents.
* [43]Partial Key Recovery Attack Against RMAC, Lars R. Knudsen and
Chris J. Mitchell
Describes a new "partial" key recovery attacks against the RMAC
block cipher based Message Authentication Code scheme.
* [44]Analysis and Design of Distributed Key Distribution Centers,
Carlo Blundo and Paolo D'Arco
Describes Distributed Key Distribution Centers in terms of an
information theory model, and presents lower bounds for the
resources needed to set up and manage a distributed center.
Top downloads from the Cryptology ePrint Archive
The top six downloads from the ePrint archive for the period May
18th through November 22, 2005. The first two have been noted in
this newsletter before and still remain heavily accessed.
* [45]Collisions for Hash Functions MD4, MD5, HAVAL-128 and RIPEMD,
X. Wang, D. Feng, X. Lai and H. Yu
This is the paper for a series of collisions in the hash functions
MD4, MD5, HAVAL-128 and RIPEMD that were announced at CRYPTO 2004
Rump Session by Ms. X. Wang.
* [46]The Misuse of RC4 in Microsoft Word and Excel, Hongjun Wu
Reports a flaw in Microsoft Word and Excel's use of the stream
cipher RC4. When an encrypted document gets modified and saved,
the initialization vector remains the same allowing information to
be recovered.
* [47]Security and Privacy Issues in E-passports, Ari Juels, David
Molnar, and David Wagner
This paper explores the privacy and security implications of
next-generation identity authentication technology in the context
of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standard
for e-passports.
* [48]How to Cheat at Chess: A Security Analysis of the Internet
Chess Club, J. Black, M. Cochran and R. Gardner
The Internet Chess Club (ICC) is a popular online chess server
with more than 30,000 members. While the security protocol used
between client and server claims sufficient security for sensitive
information to be transmitted, this paper shows that this is not
true.
* [49]High Speed Architecture for Galois/Counter Mode of Operation
(GCM), Bo Yang, Sambit Mishra, Ramesh Karri
Describes a fully pipelined implementation of AES and GCM that can
sustain 34 Gbps without using exotic hardware technology.
* [50]Picking Virtual Pockets using Relay Attacks on Contactless
Smartcard Systems, Ziv Kfir and Avishai Wool
This paper demonstrates that the assumptions about RFID based
smartcards only operating at a short distance does not hold and
suggests a low cost system that can operate at an unlimited
distance between the attacker and the victim.
[51]Complete list of recent papers in the IACR ePrint Archive
RSS News feed available for the IACR ePrint archive
Following a suggestion by several people, we are now providing RSS
feeds of the latest papers submitted to the IACR ePrint archive.
This information is updated once an hour. More information on
available feeds and formats is available [52]here.
Open positions in Cryptology
Current announcements on the IACR Website for [53]Open Positions in
Cryptology.
* University of Bonn
* University of Tsukuba, Japan
* Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
* University of Waterloo
* University College London
* Indiana University
* Stevens Institute of Technology
* Université catholique de Louvain
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