Re: A free idea about ideas...

From: Tom St Denis (tomstdenis_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 03/26/04 

Date: 26 Mar 2004 04:28:02 -0800

"Bartosz Zoltak" <QPbzoltak@vmpcfunction.com*(without "QP")> wrote in message news:<c3vvmr$rdg$1@atlantis.news.tpi.pl>...
> The "market" of new ideas looks very crowded - there are roughly 50
> crypto conferences a year (e.g. listed at IACR website), assuming each
> has 30 papers, it gives 1500 new ideas a year, 4 a day.

50 a year? Wow. Are you mixing up the "2003" labels from say
EuroCrypt, Crypto, etc... ???

I know of only a few conferences, SAC, Crypto, Eurocrypt, AsiaCrypt,
CHES, FSE, that new PK one [epfl hosts I think] and the financial
crypto one.

Also not all papers are "new ideas" as in totally new from scratch.
Quite a few are attacks, analysis, etc of previous ideas. I know, I
know, cryptanalysis is a foreign concept for ya...

> Looking at this simple statistic I am begining to really appreciate
> the people who read papers and give their opinion.

You do? Because I'm still lost with them. That's not my "never been
published self" being bitter. Quite literally my last set of review
comments weren't even about my paper!!!

> I sometimes have a feeling that most of the people are busy writing
> their own work, maybe everyone is trying to get published, invent
> something but if everyone thought this way - who would read the ideas
> and evaluate them?

Well, problem with your logic is not everyone is trying to invent the
next "wonder-pad 2000".

> I wonder how many of the ideas proposed at the comferences get lost,
> forgotten, whether all the forgotten ones are really bad ones?

This is why websites, eprint and citeseer exist.

> This partly came to me when I look at my Tail-MAC - scheme of giving a
> MAC to a stream cipher. The area is potentially interesting, not many
> MAC proposals for stream ciphers, it looks simple, works fast, looks
> secure, but I haven't heard much fedback on it.

What have you proved about it that makes me want to look at it?

> OK, I gave a brief presentation on it at FSE'04 Rump Session, I
> presented in at a seminar in Polish Academy of Sciences
> (www.impan.gov.pl) and I was invited for a national no-proceedings
> Polish conference Enigma'04 to present it along with VMPC
> (http://www.enigma.com.pl/konferencje/viii_kkzk/plan.html#s5)
> but this is still talking / writing...

Don't get me started about FSE...

> Maybe a point to be made is that no news means good news as people, I
> guess, are much more eager to say "I see a problem with this idea"
> than "I like this idea", but I guess in doesn't solve the problem.

Chances are about 7 people have looked at your design and none of them
are that concerned with it.

Anyways, you seem to be mistaken that all these crypto conferences are
about ciphers only. You'd be sadly mistaken. There is a heck of a
lot more to cryptography than some streamcipher [for which you can't
prove much of anything including the period!!!].

Tom

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