Call for Papers

General Information

will take place in on . is organized by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). Original research papers on symmetric cryptology are solicited for submission.

FSE 2018 is the 25th annual Fast Software Encryption conference that is widely recognized as the internationally leading event in the area of symmetric cryptology. Since 2002 FSE is organized by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), a global organization with more than 1600 members that brings together researchers in cryptology.

FSE focuses on fast and secure primitives for symmetric cryptography, that form the workhorse for all applications of cryptography (e.g AES, SNOW-3G, SHA-2 and SHA-3). The event covers a broad range of practical and theoretical topics including the design and analysis of block ciphers, stream ciphers, encryption schemes, hash functions, message authentication codes, authenticated encryption schemes, cryptanalysis and evaluation tools, and secure implementations. The FSE conference event offers you the unique opportunity to meet more than 200 experts from across academia and industry. We plan to have also renowned invited speakers. Past invited speakers include Prof. Adi Shamir (Turing Award Winner), Prof. Joan Daemen (designer of AES and SHA-3) and John Kelsey (NIST).

Click here to download the Call for Papers PDF

Publication Model

From last year, FSE has moved to an open-access journal/conference hybrid model. Submitted articles undergo a journal-style reviewing process. Accepted papers are published in Gold Open Access (free availability from day one) by the Ruhr University of Bochum in an issue of the newly established journal IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology.

The yearly FSE event will consist of presentations of the articles accepted to the journal IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology, as well as invited talks and social activities. This new model has been established as a way to improve reviewing and publication quality while retaining the highly successful community event FSE. For any further information, please view the FAQ page.

For FSE 2018, authors can submit papers to the IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology four times, every three months on a predictable schedule. Authors are notified of the decisions about two months after submission. In addition to accept and reject decisions, papers may be provided with “minor revision” decisions, in which case the paper is conditionally accepted and an assigned shepherd will verify if the changes are applied, or “major revision” decisions, in which case authors are invited to revise and resubmit their article to one of the following two submission deadlines, otherwise the paper will be treated as a new submission. We endeavor to assign the same reviewers to revised versions.

Papers accepted for publication before the end of January 2018 will be presented at that year’s conference. Note that it is mandatory that accepted papers at the IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology journal are presented at the corresponding FSE event.

Instructions for Authors

Submissions must not substantially duplicate work that any of the authors has published in a journal or a conference/workshop with proceedings, or has submitted/is planning to submit before the author notification deadline to a journal or other conferences/workshops that have proceedings. Accepted submissions may not appear in any other conference or workshop that has proceedings. IACR reserves the right to share information about submissions with other program committees and editorial boards to detect parallel submissions and the IACR policy on irregular submissions will be strictly enforced.

The submission must be written in English and be anonymous, with no author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, or obvious references. It should begin with a title, a short abstract, and a list of keywords. The introduction should summarize the contributions of the paper at a level appropriate for a non-specialist reader. Submissions should be typeset in the LaTeX style available here. The page limit is 20 pages excluding bibliography. Authors are encouraged to include supplementary material at the end of the paper, such as test values or source code that can assist reviewers in verifying the validity of the results; this material will not be included in the page count.

If authors believe that more details are essential to substantiate the claims of their paper or to provide proofs, they can submit a longer paper up to 40 pages (instead of up to 20); this should be indicated by ending the title with “(Long Paper)”. For long papers, the decision may be deferred to the next round at the discretion of the editors-in-chief (and to the next FSE for issue 1).

Submissions not meeting these guidelines risk rejection without consideration of their merits. The IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology journal only accepts electronic submissions in PDF format. A detailed description of the electronic submission procedure will be available here. The authors of submitted papers guarantee that their paper will be presented at the FSE 2018 conference if it is accepted.

In order to improve the quality of the review process, authors will be given the opportunity to enter a rebuttal between the indicated dates, after receiving the reviews.

Timeline for FSE 2018 / IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology 2017/2018

All upcoming deadlines are 23:59:59 Greenwich Mean Time (UTC)

Volume IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology 2017, Issue 2:
  • Submission: 1 March 2017
  • Rebuttal: 8-11 April 2017
  • Decision: 1 May 2017
  • Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers (and conditionally accepted): 28 May 2017
Volume IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology 2017, Issue 3:
  • Submission: 1 June 2017
  • Rebuttal: 8-11 July 2017
  • Decision: 1 August 2017
  • Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers (and conditionally accepted): 28 August 2017
Volume IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology 2017, Issue 4:
  • Submission: 1 September 2017
  • Rebuttal: 8-11 October 2017
  • Decision: 1 November 2017
  • Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers (and conditionally accepted): 28 November 2017
Volume IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology 2018, Issue 1
  • Submission: 23 November 2017
  • Rebuttal: 4-8 January 2018
  • Decision: 23 January 2018
  • Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers (and conditionally accepted): 23 February 2018

Stipends

The primary source of information is the conference website. A limited number of stipends are available to those unable to obtain funding to attend the conference. Students, whose papers are accepted and who will present the paper themselves, will receive a registration fee waiver funded by the IACR Cryptography Research fund for students; they are encouraged to apply for additional assistance if needed. Requests for stipends should be sent to the general chair.

Program Committee/Editorial Board

General Chair

  fse2018[@]esat.kuleuven.be
  tosc_editors18[@]iacr.org