CFail, The Conference for Failed Approaches and Insightful Losses in Cryptology, will hold its fifth edition this year as an affiliated event to Crypto 2023. 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: (extended!!!) June 10, 2023, 23:59 AoE

Notification deadline: June 30, 2023

Conference: Saturday August 19, 2023

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Submission page:  https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cfail2023

 

Instructions to Authors:

 

For this year's edition we solicit submissions of extended abstracts consisting of up to 5 pages in any legible format. 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. In addition to this and to encourage the submission of works that would normally be harder to publish elsewhere (e.g., negative results) we partnered with the Computer Journal (https://academic.oup.com/comjnl). After the conference, authors of eligible accepted abstracts will be invited to submit a full version of their work to be reviewed for potential publication in the journal. 

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 at allibishop@gmail.com or the program chair at jeongeun.park@esat.kuleuven.be with any inquiries. 

 

The CFAIL 2023 Program Committee

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Allison Bishop, Proof Trading and City College, CUNY (General Chair)

Katherina Boudgoust, Aarhus University

Sofía Celi, Brave Software

Siemen Dhooghe, KU Leuven

Orr Dunkelman, University of Haifa

Agnese Gini, University of Luxembourg

Siyao Guo, NYU Shanghai

Akiko Inoue, NEC

Nadim Kobeissi, Nym Technologies SA

Chloe Martindale, University of Bristol

Nicky Mouha, NIST

Tamalika Mukherjee, Purdue University

Miyako Ohkubo, NICT

Emmanuela Orsini, Bocconi University

Jeongeun Park, KU Leuven (Program Chair)

Hilder Vitor Lima Pereira, KU Leuven

Rachel Player, Royal Holloway London

Antigoni Polychroniadou, J.P. Morgan

Carla Rafols, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Benjamin Smith, Inria

Anupama Unnikrishnan, ETH Zürich

Alexandre Wallet, Inria Rennes

Arantxa Zapico, Ethereum Foundation.

Mark Zhandry, NTT Research

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