CFail, The Conference for Failed Approaches and Insightful Losses in Cryptology, will hold its seventh edition this year as an affiliated event to Crypto 2025. This will be a hybrid event, supporting both in-person and remote participation. Our goal is to share insights and build a collective experience within the cryptographic community about how and why good ideas sometimes fail, and what we can learn from those failures. 

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Original contributions in all fields of cryptology are sought detailing currently unsuccessful but insightful attempts to:

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• Prove or disprove a conjecture,

• Design or break a cryptographic algorithm,

• Simplify a cryptographic algorithm or concept,

• Implement a cryptosystem,

• Formulate a new security definition or reduction,

• Systemize a collection of ad-hoc attacks,

• Or any other task that is part of the practice of theoretical or applied cryptology, broadly construed.

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Do you have insightful and exciting work sitting in a drawer somewhere because it never quite panned out or are you willing to share the series of failed attempts you went through before reaching a successful result? 

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Timeline:

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​Submission deadline: June 8, 2025, 23:59 AoE (extended from June 1, 2025)

Notification deadline: June 27, 2025

Conference: Saturday August 16, 2025

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Submission page:  https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cfail2025

Instructions to Authors:

For this year's edition we solicit submissions of extended abstracts in any legible format. There is no page limit, but the paper should be intelligible by reviewers who are not required to read past the 5th page. Submissions should begin with a title, followed by the names, affiliations, and contact information of all authors. Submissions should be uploaded to EasyChair in PDF form to be reviewed and judged by the Program Committee. It is up to the authors to decide how they choose to engage the reviewing readers.  Clarity of exposition, educational value, and the ability to generalize conclusions into a wider setting will be strongly taken into account.

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To allow for the submission of papers published elsewhere there will be no formal proceedings. Instead, accepted abstracts will be made available online before the conference. Authors of such submissions should make sure that they are re-framed in line with CFail's goals. Authors of accepted abstracts will be given a 20-30 minute slot for presenting their submission at the conference followed by a 5-10 minute Q\&A. Speakers and participants will not be required to travel physically and talks will be recorded and made available subject to speaker permission. 

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Please contact the general chair Allison Bishop (allibishop@gmail.com) or the program chairs Eli Goldin (eli.goldin@nyu.edu), Eysa Lee (eysa_lee@brown.edu), and Ngoc Khanh Nguyen (ngoc_khanh.nguyen@kcl.ac.uk) with any inquiries. 

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