Call for Papers

Dear Cryptologists,

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Do you have insightful and exciting work sitting in a drawer somewhere because it never quite panned out? Are you willing to share your failed approaches so that others can learn from them without having to re-travel the same road? Are you tired of reading papers that pretend the incremental result they happened to achieve was well-motivated and was their goal all along?

We are! That’s why we are founding a new conference: a place for papers that describe instructive failures or not-yet-successes, as they may prefer to be called.

The first Conference for Failed Approaches and Insightful Losses (CFAIL) is seeking original papers in the field of cryptology that detail currently unsuccessful but insightful attempts to:

Prove a conjecture,

Disprove a conjecture,

Design a cryptographic algorithm or reduction,

Simplify a cryptographic algorithm or concept,

Cryptanalyze a cryptosystem,

Implement a cryptosystem,

Formulate a new security definition,

Systemize a collection of ad-hoc attacks,

Or any other task that is part of the practice of theoretical or applied cryptology, broadly construed.

Papers that are accepted will be invited to give 1-hour talks at CFAIL 2019, which will take place May 31-June 2, 2019 at Columbia University in New York City. There will be no formal proceedings, but accepted papers will be available online before appearing at the conference. Talks will be recorded and also made available (subject to speaker permission).

There are no pesky page limits or formatting requirements. It is up to authors how they choose to engage the reviewing readers, who are not guaranteed to read or not read beyond any particular point. Clarity of exposition will be strongly taken into account. Submission files should not include author names, but it is understood that it may be necessary to reference attributed material elsewhere (e.g. in case of papers that describe a behind the scenes account of failures accompanying previously published successes).

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Submission deadline: 11:59 pm EST on April 7, 2019 (updated)

Paper notification: April 26, 2019

Conference Dates: May 31-June 2, 2019