Theory of Cryptography Library: the initiative

Motivation by Oded Goldreich

In recent years, I found it increasingly harder to follow the theoretical developments in Cryptography. I think that the main reason for this is the failure of the Crypto conferences to provide a stage for these developments. (Failure is a neutral term here; to be more blunt, I'd say that my feeling is that the Crypto conferences have shown increasing disinterest in Cryptographic theory. This is indeed a very strange phenomenon, but I'll not deal with it here.)

FOCS and STOC still provide a stage for a few cryptographic theory papers per year. But they cannot offer a stage to all interesting work in Cryptographic theory. Furthermore, they seem to prefer work which has wider appeal (i.e., of interest also to researchers out of cryptography), and one may say that they are justified in doing so. This means that the work in cryptography theory which has no such wider appeal has even less exposure opertunities. (PODC seems to be willing to host a few cryptographic works related to distributed computing, but also this does not provide a solution to the problem described above.)

In an attempt to solve the problem (of stage for crypto-theory work), I'm suggesting to maintain a "library" of cryptographic theory work. What I envision is that any cryptographic theory work that would normally be submitted to a Crypto conference will appear in the library. (There is no intension to discourage submission to Crypto conferences.) The sole criteria for inclusion of a work in the library will be that it seems to be a non-trivial work of some interest to theory of cryptography. That is, I suggest that only the abstract be scanned to verify that the work seems within scope and of some interest.

Remarks:

• Although inclusion in the library cannot provide any publication "credit", I think it will provide the most important feature of publication: informing the relevant research community of new work of interest. I suggest to send, periodically, notifications on new works to all "subscribes of the library".
• Needless to say that inclusion in the library will not prevent the submission or appearance of the work in any conference or journal. In addition, I suggest to allow authors to remove their work from the library at any time. I suggest that in such a case, the library will only hold a record containing the abstract of the removed work and the reason for removal (e.g., appearance in a journal).
• At this point, I'm volunteering to do all the work by myself. (The reason being that this seems easier than waiting for a group to be organized and take the work upon itself.) Certainly, I'd be very happy if any of you volunteers to help in maintaining the library. Certainly, if this idea gets to work successfully then I will ask to be replaced in a few years...
• I'm estimating the (optimal) number of works in the library to be around 50 papers per year, and the number of subscribers to be around 50. In case my figures are gross underestimates, I'll certainly be in big trouble (as I'll not be able to handle bigger volumes by myself). But in such a case, I'm sure we will find an alternative (more organized) solution.
• I do not intend to widely-publicize the existence of the library (e.g., to send an announcement on theorynet). I suggest to use word-of-mouth within the relevant community. In particular, feel free to pass this mail to anybody you feel may be interested. The mailing-list was composed by me without much thought and I'm sure that I've forgot to include several researchers which must have been included. (The reason not to widely-publicize the library is avoiding the danger of being flooded by requests from outside the research community. If somebody volunteer to handle these requests then I'll waive my objection to wide-publication.)
• Off course, a much better solution that the above is starting a yearly conference/workshop on theory of cryptography. However, this seems much harder to establish (if at all possible).