A few words on research in cryptology

Cryptology is the science of secret, which can be viewed nowadays as the scientific study of adversarial information protection. Strictly speaking, it can be subdivided in two fields: cryptography and cryptanalysis. Can I send my credit card number securely over the Internet? Can I authentify emails? Is there such a thing as electronic cash? Those are typical questions that cryptology tries to answer.

For historical reasons, cryptologic research is managed by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), and not by IEEE or ACM like some other fields of computer science.

The most prestigious publications in cryptology are publications in the two oldest international conferences organized by IACR: CRYPTO (held each year in August at the University of California in Santa Barbara, USA since 1981) and EUROCRYPT (held each year around May in a different location in Europe since 1982) which both gather about 400-500 people.

• John Black keeps the number of CRYPTO/EUROCRYPT publications for all researchers, by year.
• Lars Knudsen keeps acceptance rates for all IACR conferences. Submission to IACR conferences is anonymous, as opposed to many other fields.
• IACR, together with Springer, has published a CD-rom compiling all CRYPTO/EUROCRYPT publications from 1981 to 1997 (see also the second CD-rom covering 1998-2003 with additional conferences).

This should of course be taken with caution. If researcher A has more CRYPTO/EUROCRYPT publications than researcher B, it does not necessarily mean that A is a better cryptologist than B. An article A from CRYPTO/EUROCRYPT is not necessarily more interesting than an article B from ASIACRYPT/PKC/FSE/etc. But all those statistics help to figure out who's doing research in cryptology.

Apart from CRYPTO/EUROCRYPT, there are now lots of crypto conferences published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. First of all, there are other IACR conferences: ASIACRYPT, the main crypto conference in Asia, and dedicated workshops (PKC for asymmetric crypto, FSE for symmetric crypto, CHES for hardware issues). But there are also lots of small conferences (see IACR's calendar of events), as well as independent conferences with interest in some aspects of cryptology, notably:

• ACM's STOC and IEEE's FOCS often include sessions on theoretical/complexity/foundations aspects of cryptology.
• The Algorithmic Number Theory Symposium (ANTS) held every 2 years, and published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.
• ACM's conference on computers and communications security (CCS).

There are also a few journals of course. The main journal is IACR's Journal of Cryptology (received by all IACR members), not to be confused with the Journal of Craptology. The journals Designs, Codes and Cryptography and IEEE Transactions on Information Theory also publish regularly articles in cryptology.