Call for Papers

General Information

The Seventeenth Theory of Cryptography Conference will be held in Nuremberg, Germany, sponsored by the 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.

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.
  • 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.

Dates

May 29 2019

Submission Deadline
at 22:59 UTC


Aug 20 2019

Notification of Decision


Sep 20 2019

Proceedings Version


Dec 1 2019

Conference

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. The authors have two choices for the paper format. They may typeset their paper using Springer LNCS format with page numbers enabled (\pagestyle{plain}), keeping spacing, font sizes, and margins provided by the format. Alternatively, they may typeset their paper to fit on US letter or ISO A4 paper with at least 11pt font and reasonable spacing and margins. There is no page limit, but the paper should be intelligible by reviewers who are not required to read past the 15th page of the Springer format or past the 12th page of any other format (the bibliography does not need to appear in the first 12 or 15 pages, respectively).

Submissions must not substantially duplicate work that was published elsewhere, or work that any of the authors has submitted in parallel to any other journal, 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; presentations may be recorded and made available to the public online. 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 young researcher paper award

This prize is for the best paper authored solely by young researchers, where a young researcher is a person that at the time of the paper's submission is at most two years past his/her graduation from a PhD program. 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 Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) with Springer. The on-line version will be available at the conference. Physical books will be available after the conference for a separate fee. 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.

Conflict of Interest Policy

A conflict of interest (COI) is a situation in which a person is involved in multiple interests, one of which could affect the judgment of that individual. A general rule is that anyone is considered in conflict if a reasonable person would question the individual as an impartial reviewer, once relevant information is given. As the submissions to TCC are not anonymous we do not ask the authors to declare COI in the submission; instead we require reviewers to declare a COI.

We say that a reviewer has an automatic COI with an author if:

  • one is the thesis advisor of the other at the time of submission or one was the thesis advisor of the other with thesis defended less than 10 years before the submission deadline;
  • they share an institutional affiliation at the time of submission (in case of large institutions such as IBM or MSR, "institutional affiliation" refers only to smaller units such as department or lab);
  • they are immediate family members; or
  • if the reviewer feels that he/she is unable to judge the paper fairly.

A program committee member with an automatic COI with an author of a paper is blocked from seeing the discussion on the paper. Program committee members and any other reviewer will also need to declare any other COI (e.g., collaboration on recent papers).

If the authors feel that certain experts are strongly biased against their paper, they should inform the PC chairs about it by email. The PC chairs reserve the right to request a more specific description of a COI declaration from authors.

Program Committee

General Chair

Dominique Schröder

University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
Germany

  tcc2019@iacr.org
  tcc2019programchairs@iacr.org