Preface to Volume 2022, Issue 1

Abstract

IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology (ToSC) is a forum for original results in all areas of symmetric cryptography, including the design and analysis of block ciphers, stream ciphers, encryption schemes, hash functions, message authentication codes, (cryptographic) permutations, authenticated encryption schemes, cryptanalysis and evaluation tools, and security issues and solutions regarding their implementation. ToSC implements an open-access journal/conference hybrid model following some other communities in computer science. All articles undergo a journal-style reviewing process and accepted papers are published in gold open access (in our case the Creative Commons License CC-BY 4.0). The review procedures that we have followed strictly adhere to the traditions of the journal world. The ToSC review process strives to maintain a high quality of published articles. Full papers are assigned to at least three members of the Editorial Board; for submissions by Editorial Board members this was increased to at least four. These members write detailed and careful reviews (usually without relying on subreviewers). Moreover, we have had a rebuttal phase, allowing authors to respond to the review comments before the final decisions. If necessary, the review process enables further interactions between the authors and the reviewers, mediated by the Co-Editors-in-Chief. The Editorial Board can also decide to ask for a minor or major revision of the paper when changes are deemed necessary to improve its quality. Furthermore, the Editorial Board can give a “reject and resubmit” decision in case a submission is considered to have potential, but there are significant issues to address before it can be properly evaluated. Next to regular submissions, ToSC also accepts submissions of addendum and errata papers. Addendum papers aim at extending an existing ToSC paper in a novel, yet succinct way. Errata papers aim at correcting an error in an existing ToSC paper. Overall, we are very pleased with the quality and quantity of submissions, the detailed review reports written by the reviewers and the substantial efforts by the authors to further improve the quality of their work. We think that the review process, and in particular the use of major revisions, leads to an increased quality of the papers that are published. The papers selected by the Editorial Board for publication are presented at the conference Fast Software Encryption (FSE). This gives the authors the opportunity to advertize their results and engage in discussions on further work. In 2022, FSE was held during March 20-25, 2022 in Athens, Greece. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was organized in a different way than usual. Most importantly, the conference was held in a hybrid format, accommodating both in-person and online participation. In addition, as FSE 2021 was cancelled, part of the papers originally scheduled for FSE 2021 were postponed to FSE 2022. In detail, papers from the following six issues of ToSC have been presented at FSE 2022: 2020(4), 2021(1), 2021(2), 2021(3), 2021(4) and 2022(1). In addition to the scientific papers from the journal, FSE 2022 had two invited talks: Orr Dunkelman on optimizing cryptanalysis and Christian Rechberger on symmetric cryptography for new applications.