# Oddly Shaped Pegs

An inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Stuff

## TCC 2016-B Call For Papers

(Posting this here as a backup, since the main TCC website is temporarily down. The submission server is up and running though.)

The Fourteenth Theory of Cryptography Conference will be held in Beijing, China, sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). Papers presenting original research on foundational and theoretical aspects of cryptography are sought. For more information about TCC, see the TCC manifesto.

 Submission Deadline Friday, May 20, 2016, Anywhere on Earth Notification of Decision August 1, 2016 Proceedings Version Due August 23, 2016 Conference November 1-3, 2016

The Theory of Cryptography Conference deals with the paradigms, approaches, and techniques used to conceptualize natural cryptographic problems and provide algorithmic solutions to them. More specifically, the scope of the conference includes, but is not limited to the:

• Study of known paradigms, approaches, and techniques, directed towards their better understanding and utilization,
• Discovery of new paradigms, approaches and techniques that overcome limitations of the existing ones,
• Formulation and treatment of new cryptographic problems.
• Study of notions of security and relations among them,
• Modeling and analysis of cryptographic algorithms, and
• Study of the complexity assumptions used in cryptography.

The Theory of Cryptography Conference is dedicated to providing a premier venue for the dissemination of results within its scope. The conference aims to provide a meeting place for researchers and to be instrumental in shaping the identity of the theoretical cryptography community.

### Instructions for Authors

The submission should begin with a title, followed by the names, affiliations and contact information of all authors, and a short abstract. It should contain a scholarly exposition of ideas, techniques, and results, including motivation and a clear comparison with related work. Submission must be typeset using the Springer LNCS format with page numbers enabled (\pagestyle{plain}). The main body of the submission, including title page and figures, must not exceed 20 pages. In addition, any amount of clearly marked supplementary material and references are allowed. However, reviewers are not required to read or review any supplementary material and submissions are expected to be intelligible and complete without it.

Submissions must not substantially duplicate work that was published elsewhere, or work that any of the authors has submitted in parallel to any other conference or workshop that has proceedings; see the IACR policy on irregular submissions for more information.

At least one author of each accepted paper is required to present the paper at the conference. Authors are strongly encouraged to post full versions of their submissions in a freely accessible online repository, such as the Cryptology ePrint archive. We encourage the authors to post such a version at the time of submission (in which case the authors should provide a link on the title page of their submission). At the minimum, we expect that authors of accepted papers will post a full version of their papers by the camera-ready deadline. Abstracts of accepted papers will be made public by the PC following the notification.

### Contacting the Authors

At submission time, authors must provide one or several email addresses for corresponding authors. Throughout the review period, at least one corresponding author is expected to be available to receive and quickly answer questions (via email) that arise about their submissions.

### Submission instructions

Papers must be submitted electronically through the submission web page. The authors are allowed to revise the paper any number of times before the submission deadline, and only the latest submitted version will be seen by the PC. Therefore, the authors are advised not to wait until the last moment for the initial submission.

### Best student paper award

This prize is for the best paper authored solely by students, where a student is a person that is considered a student by the respective institution at the time of the paper’s submission. Eligibility must be indicated at the time of submission (using a checkbox in the submission form). The program committee may decline to make the award, or may split it among several papers.

### Proceedings

Proceedings will be published in Springer-Verlag’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series and will be available at the conference. Instructions for preparing the final proceedings version will be sent to the authors of accepted papers. The final copies of the accepted papers will be due on the camera-ready deadline listed above. This is a strict deadline, and authors should prepare accordingly.

### Program Committee

Masayuki Abe (NTT)
Divesh Aggarwal (EPFL)
Andrej Bogdanov (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Elette Boyle (IDC Herzliya)
Christina Brzuska (TU Hamburg)
David Cash (Rutgers)
Alessandro Chiesa (UC Berkeley)
Nico Döttling (UC Berkeley)
Sergey Gorbunov (U. Waterloo)
Martin Hirt (ETH Zurich) — Co-chair
Abhishek Jain (Johns Hopkins)
Huijia Lin (UC Santa Barbara)
Hemanta K. Maji (Purdue)
Rafael Pass (Cornell Tech)
Krzysztof Pietrzak (IST Austria)
Manoj Prabhakaran (U. Illinois, Urbana Champaign)
Renato Renner (ETH Zurich)
Alon Rosen (IDC Herzliya)
abhi shelat (U. Virginia)
Adam Smith (Penn State) — Co-chair
John Steinberger (Tsinghua)
Jonathan Ullman (Northeastern)
Vinod Vaikuntanathan (MIT)
Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam (U. Rochester)

### Conference Honorary Chair

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (IIIS, Tsinghua University, China)

### General Chair

Dongdai Lin (SKLOIS, Institute of Information Engineering, CAS, China)

### TCC Steering Committee Members

Mihir Bellare, Ivan Damgård, Shafi Goldwasser, Shai Halevi (chair), Russell Impagliazzo, Ueli Maurer, Silvio Micali, Moni Naor, and Tatsuaki Okamoto.

TCC web site: http://www.iacr.org/workshops/tcc/

May 2, 2016 at 9:02 am

Posted in Conferences, Uncategorized

Tagged with , ,

## TCC 2016-B: Deadline May 20

TCC (the Theory of Cryptography Conference) is moving to a late Fall schedule, so this year the conference will occur twice! TCC 2016-A happened already, and TCC 2016-B will happen in November in Beijing.

Deadline is coming up — May 20, 2016.
http://tcc2016b.sklois.cn/call_for_papers.html

(Backup posted on this blog.)
“Theory of cryptography” is broad, and should really be interpreted as “mathematical aspects of information security”. That includes everything from mainstream cryptographic topics (encryption, zero-knowledge and, more recently, obfuscation) to data privacy, information theoretic secrecy, relevant combinatorics and number theory, logic and programming language theory. Experimental work is also welcome to the extent it is driven by and informs our mathematical understanding of a problem.

April 27, 2016 at 9:06 am

Posted in Conferences, Uncategorized

Tagged with , ,

## TCC, Day 1

(Presenting partial, i.e. biased and incomplete, coverage of the conference talks, lunch discussions, and ideas “in the air” at TCC 2009)

Attending TCC is always a pleasure: the community is friendly, and the topic is narrow enough that I can usually understand all the talks at the conference. I don’t have time to write about all the day’s talks, but here are some of my notes…

The morning session talks focused on “fairness” in secure function evaluation (SFE). Roughly, a distributed SFE protocol is fair if either all honest players get the correct output, or none of them get the correct output. In 1986, Cleve showed that no two-party coin-flipping protocol that resists malicious behaviour from either party can be fair: it is always possible for either Alice or Bob to cheat and bias the result of the coin-flip somewhat.

Recently, Gordon, Hazay, Katz and Lindell showed that, nevertheless, several functions (such as the greater-than function) can be computed fairly by two mutually untrusting parties. This work was the backdrop for the first two papers of the morning:

• Tal Moran gave a great talk explaining a coin flipping protocol that matches Cleve’s lower bound on the bias that some cheating party can impose on the coin’s value. The r-round version of the new Moran-Naor-Segev protocol has bias $O(1/r),$ whereas the previous best achievable bias was $O(1/\sqrt{r}).$

This result is surprising because (a) the protocol is very simple, and (b) Cleve and Impagliazzo had previously shown a lower bound of $\Omega(1/\sqrt{r})$ in a restricted model. Because of (b), Tal  (and others) had initially assumed that the real optimal bias was $O(1/\sqrt{r}).$ This is a nice example of a long-standing problem where the common wisdom was pointing in the wrong direction, yet whose solution was simple. The tool kit for the solution came, in part, from the GHKL paper on perfectly fair protocols for functionalities that are very different from coin-flipping, which brings us to talk 2…

• … in which Dov Gordon (of GHKL) discussed the difficulties of extending the GHKL two-party fair protocols to larger number of parties.  The results are still very partial, but it seems that fairness, even with 3 parties, is much mroe complicated than fairness with two parties. The interesting part here is the failure of the folklore that “anything” you can do with 2-parties, one of whom may be cheating, can be done with n parties, n-1 of whom may be cheating.

Another nice aspect of the recent fairness papers is the influence that (I think) the work on fair protocols for rational players has had on fair protocols for the traditional cryptographic model of malicious players. Although some of the connections are obvious (everybody seems to like the “commit to shares of the secret and reveal gradually” approach), my feeling is that there is a more subtle connection to be discovered…

There were of course many other great talks in the day. A particular highlight was Chris Peikert’s invited talk on lattice-based crypto. Chris does a remarkable job of pairing down the notation and definitions necessary to explain the basic results in the area. No doubt there are more good things to come out of this area.

Another highlight (for me!) was Shabsi Walfish’s talk on our joint work on deniability in the face of “online” attacks… which I will demurely refrain from plugging excessively here.