Dear all, As the DIAC workshop is coming, i thought i'd share a reflection on the CAESAR competition.
We're having 3rd Round now, many interesting ciphers still in the competition and some interesting had to be rejected. My concern is basically there has not been any discussion. But my main point is that it's not coincidence or laziness of people there is no discussion, comments, remarks. It's rather how the feedback has (not) been given or a climate for discussion has been set up. CAESAR has been running by our (relatively) small symmetric crypto community. I think we should strive for openness and a free flow of ideas. After the second round, designers received (after several weeks) feedback from the committee members on their algorithms. But privately. CAESAR is not the conference and if our point becomes "let's avoid some unnecessary discussion" something is clearly wrong. Yes, from time to time there might be some heated discussion, but generally we gain much more from openness and transparency. Also, i believe this is a huge waste of committee members effort. Some feedback were superficial but some were very detailed. Particularly, for young researchers or PhD students it could be very useful and interesting to see much experienced point of view. Or, perhaps, a good starting point for a fruitful argument. Ironically, FSE recently has moved to a new journal-conference model which should provide much better use of reviewers feedback and introduce more collaborative (authors + reviewers) responsibility for a submitted paper. i hope it will work great. With CAESAR it looks like we end up with something opposite. Regards, Paweł -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cryptographic competitions" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to crypto-competitions+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to crypto-competitions@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/crypto-competitions. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
