Peter Schwabe
Candidacy for a position as Director (IACR elections 2025)
I am a scientific director 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 since 2009 and serve on the IACR Board of Directors since 2020. In 2018 I organized CHES in Amsterdam together with Ileana Buhan; in 2021 I was CHES program co-chair together with Elke De Mulder; 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
While the IACR general conferences and area conferences are certainly the most important venues for our community to meet, we should also keep in mind the importance of the regional conferences like SAC, Indocrypt, Latincrypt, and Africacrypt. I have served on many of the program committees of these conferences, 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.
Scaling of IACR events
One of the biggest challenges that the IACR currently faces results from the increasing number of submissions to our conferences. I am a member of the working group within the Board that aims at finding solutions to those challenges. What is important to me in these discussions is that our conferences remain venues for the community to meet and *confer* rather than rush through shorter and shorter talks in more and more sessions. Regarding publications, I am in favor to some sort of journal/conference hybrid model for the general conferences, following the positive experience we have made at ToSC/FSE and at TCHES/CHES.
Availability and reproducibility of results
With the ePrint archive, three 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 role as program chair of CHES 2021, 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. This approach to artifact evaluation has now been adopted to some extent also by other IACR venues and I would like to continue working on making artifact evaluation and publication a more standard feature of the IACR publication culture.