ICISC 2011: Day 1

Yesterday was Day 1 of ICISC 2011. This year the conference is making its 14th appearance and this time the conference received the maximum number of submission in its history (total 128 submissions) and the acceptance ratio is 25.2%. The emphasis on Day 1 was mostly on practical crypto: one session on side channel, one on network security and one invited talk on light weight crypto. In addition to this, there was one session on hash functions and one on public key cryptography. Apparently I was requested to chair the session on hash functions. This was the first time when I chaired any session and interestingly, I was given 100$ for the same:)-

I could not make much out of yesterday's talks, as most of them were related to the topics that are not my cup of tea. However, I did like the invited talk on light weight cryptography by Thomas Peyrin. Actually this is the first time I listened to any talk on this topic. The speaker very nicely introduced what light weight cryptography means and what are the major goals and challenges. What I could understand from his talk is that the major goal is to design light weight crypto primitives, specifically light weight block ciphers and light weight hash functions, which provide us with appropriate level of security and speed and at the same time not utilizing much resources (in this context, it is the space) so as to be used in applications like RFID. Various guidelines for the design of these primitives, meeting the above requirements were also discussed. The speaker also talked about one of his latest light weight hash function and one light weight block cipher, which were published in CHES 2011 and CRYPTO 2011. However, I could not make much out of them as it became too technical for me. Moreover, I was having severe jet lag (Seoul is around 9hrs ahead of Bristol time) and even now I am finding it difficult to adjust to the local time.

Overall, the first day experience at ICISC 2011 was OK. But I am looking forward specifically for the last day talks, as there are several talks related to protocols and theoretical cryptography and I am hopeful that they will be interesting.