During the coming winter, I will be lucky to be part of three program committees:

• The 18th edition of Fast Software Encryption (FSE 2011), happening in Lyngby, Denmark, on February 14-16, 2011. This international workshop, one of the flagship events of the IACR, is mostly targeting all nerds dreaming about cryptographic symmetric primitives a vast majority of their nights. The program committee is chaired by Antoine Joux, and the call of papers can be found here. The submission deadline is fixed to November 7, 2010, 23h59 CET.

• The 11th edition of the International Workshop on Coding and Cryptography (WCC 2011), happening in Paris, France, on April 11-15, 2011. Its aim is to «bring together researchers in all aspects of coding theory, cryptography and related areas, theoretical or applied.» The program committee is chaired by Anne Canteaut and Daniel Augot, and the call of papers can be found here. The submission deadline is fixed to January 18, 2011.
• The 13th edition of Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES 2011), happening in Tokyo, Japan, on September 25-28, 2011. This international workshop, also one of the important events of the IACR, is dedicated to all aspects of cryptographic hardware and security in embedded systems. The program committee is chaired by Bart Preneel and Tsuyoshi Takagi, and a preliminary call of papers can be found here. The submission deadline is fixed to March 28, 2011, 23h59 JST.

Back from Chicago, it is now time to put online our DRM’10 paper, co-written with Alexandre Karlov of Nagravision SA. The workshop ran quite smoothly: the first keynote talk was given by Moni Naor, who showed some unexpected and interesting links between cryptographic traitor tracing and privacy issues in databases. The second keynote talk was given by  Warren Lieberfarb, known as the the “father of DVD” and a former president of  Warner Home Video, on his views of the future interactions between the Internet and the motion picture industry.

A paper, co-written with Alexandre Karlov of Nagravision SA and titled “An efficient public-key attribute-based broadcast encryption scheme allowing arbitrary access policies“, has been accepted for presentation at the ACM-DRM 2010 workshop (list of accepted papers), which will be held in conjunction with the 17th ACM-CCS in Chicago (USA) on October 4th, 2010. The final version of our paper is not ready yet, but here is at least its abstract:

We describe a new public-key and provably secure attribute-based broadcast encryption scheme which supports complex access policies with AND, OR and NOT gates. Our scheme, especially targeting the implementation of efficient Pay-TV systems, can handle conjunctions of disjunctions (CNF) by construction and disjunctions of conjunctions (DNF) by concatenation, which are the most general forms of Boolean expressions. It is based on a modification of the Boneh-Gentry-Waters broadcast encryption scheme in order to achieve attribute collusion resistance and to support complex Boolean access policies. The security of our scheme is proven in the generic model of groups with pairings. Finally, we compare our scheme to several other Attribute-based Broadcast Encryption designs, both in terms of bandwidth requirements and implementation costs.

On the funny side, the DRM field looks like to adopt more and more zero-knowledge techniques: the first e-mail received from the program committee is a good illustration thereof (the ambiguity has then been corrected very quickly by the PC chairs):

Dear Pascal Junod:

Thank you very much for submitting your paper "An efficient public-key attribute-based broadcast encryption scheme allowing arbitrary access policies" to ACM-DRM 2010. We are very pleased to inform you that your submission was not among the selected ones.

Please revise your paper according to the reviewers's comments (see below). You should prepare your camera-ready version according to the ACM proceedings format (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). You will be contacted by Lisa Tolles (Sheridan Printing) with detailed instructions and guidelines. The deadline for submitting your revised version is August 16 (this is a firm deadline).

Yours sincerely,

Hongxia Jin, Marc Joye ACM-DRM 2010 Program Chairs