Editor’s Preface for the Second Annual MathCrypt Proceedings Volume

In 2017, we decided to start the annual series of MathCrypt Workshops in order to encourage more mathematicians and computational number theorists to propose and work on hard problems in cryptography. This is the second volume of papers from our second annual MathCrypt conference hosted at Crypto 2019, on August 19, 2019 in Santa Barbara.

We were motivated to launch this series of workshops to attract more mathematicians to work on hard problems in cryptography. There is a gap in the publishing culture between mathematics and computer science which we hope to bridge with this effort. Mathematicians primarily recognize publications in journals, whereas cryptographers almost always publish their results quickly in proceedings volumes of conferences which are the most prestigious venues for the research area. Many mathematicians are not accustomed to the model of submitting a paper by the conference deadline, presenting the work at the conference, and publishing in the proceedings volume. We wanted to provide a regular annual venue for mathematicians to contribute to the cryptographic research community at this accelerated pace, and the Journal of Mathematical Cryptology was an ideal place and a willing partner to create this opportunity.

We are at a point in time where it is increasingly important for mathematicians to be involved in cryptography research, as we set out to determine the next generation of cryptographic systems based on hard math problems which can withstand attacks from a quantum computer once it is built. In 2017, NIST launched a 5-year international competition to determine post-quantum cryptosystems (PQC).

MathCrypt can play a complimentary role by encouraging mathematicians to work on and publish attacks on new proposals, including both preliminary results and also even results which represent the failure of a certain approach to effectively attack a new system. This creates the culture of sharing information on approaches which have been tried and their measure of success. Currently there is such a high bar for publishing papers with new attacks. Attacking the underlying hard math problems in cryptography is an extremely challenging endeavor, and so the incentives are not aligned to encourage new researchers and young researchers to work and commit themselves to this direction. The opportunity to publish intermediate results in venues like MathCrypt should help to de-risk this endeavor and encourage more mathematician to pursue these research directions.

The MathCrypt proceedings volumes are also intended as a place to publish proposals for new cryptographic systems based on new ideas for hard math problems. The post quantum era provides both an opportunity and a challenge to mathematicians to create new systems based on new ideas. When an idea for a hard math problem is first proposed, it can be hard to evaluate the long-term potential in the span of a few weeks during a short review cycle. Thus more established venues may be reluctant to accept such papers in their highly competitive process since they could be viewed as a risk if they are found to be weak proposals within a relatively short time span. MathCrypt provides a forum and community for discussion and publication of new proposals.

Significant funding opportunities exist, for example in the US with the National Science Foundation (NSF) SaTC cybersecurity program, and proposals for new systems and mathematical cryptography research directions may be good candidates for support from federal grants. In fact, a Program Officer from NSF spoke at the first MathCrypt workshop in August 2018 and encouraged participants to apply to the NSF SaTC program for potential support for their research.

The founders of MathCrypt, Jung Hee Cheon and Kristin Lauter, were joined by Yongsoo Song to form the Organizing Committee. The one-day workshop included 11 talks, representing the accepted papers. The program and full list of accepted papers are below. The Program Chairs are grateful to the program committee who worked hard to evaluate the submitted papers and did an outstanding job of selecting many papers worthy of presentation and publication. We hope MathCrypt will continue to be a successful conference and a prestigious venue for presentation of important mathematical results in cryptography which are published together in volumes of the Journal of Mathematical Cryptology.

On behalf of the Editors,

  Jung Hee Cheon (Seoul National University)

  Kristin Lauter (Microsoft Research)

  Yongsoo Song (Microsoft Research)