Image of PeterPeter Schwabe

Candidacy for a position as Director (IACR elections 2022)

I am a research-group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum, Germany, and a professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. I have been an IACR member for 13 years and serve on the IACR Board of Directors since January 2020 years. In 2018 I organized CHES in Amsterdam together with Ileana Buhan (Riscure); in 2021 I was CHES program co-chair together with Elke De Mulder (Rambus); and in 2022 I organized RWC in Amsterdam together with Lejla Batina and Joan Daemen (both Radboud University). I am currently a member of the Steering Committees of CHES and RWC.

The engineering side of crypto

Probably most IACR members would see me as a crypto engineer and given that most of my IACR publications are at CHES this is a pretty adequate characterisation. My motivation for working on cryptography comes from real-world challenges and therefore my goal as Director is to represent the real-world or engineering side of crypto on the Board.

Supporting regional conferences

There is no doubt that the IACR general conferences and area conferences are the most important venues for our community to meet. We should, however, also keep in mind the importance of the regional conferences organized in cooperation with the IACR like SAC, Indocrypt, Latincrypt, and Africacrypt. I am a regular member of program committees of these conferences, regularly attend them, and was program chair of Latincrypt 2019. One of my goals as Director of the IACR is to find ways to further support these events.

Availability and reproducibility of results

With the eprint archive, two gold open-access journals, and a general culture of open-sourcing software, our community is doing a pretty good job at making our results available and reproducible for other researchers and the general public. However, this should not be a reason to not try to improve further in this regard. In my statement for candidacy for the IACR BoD in 2019, I described the idea of setting up a repository for artifacts within the IACR. Admittedly more in my role as CHES program co-chair and with the massive support of Elke De Mulder, Douglas Stebila, and Kevin McCurley, we established a process for artifact evaluation at CHES and a repository for artifacts within the IACR; For CHES 2023 I took on the role of artifact-evaluation chair and I am hoping to convince other IACR venues to join CHES in this effort to improve artifact availability and reward the effort that goes into libraries and tools that many of us use and appreciate.