Preface to TCHES Volume 2021

Abstract

Having been established in 1999, the Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) conference is today the premier venue for research on both design and analysis of cryptographic hardware and software implementations. As an area conference of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), CHES bridges the cryptographic research and engineering communities, and attracts participants from academia, industry, government and beyond. CHES 2021 was held as a virtual event on September 13–17, 2021 after careful discussion half a year prior to the conference dates about whether or not it would be realistic to hold an in-person event due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It was the second exclusively virtual and the twenty-third overall edition of the CHES conference. Since 2018, CHES is run under a hybrid model as a mixture of journal publications and conference presentations. The papers constituting the CHES 2021 program were published in the IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (TCHES) Volume 2021, Issues 1, 2, 3 and 4 under a platinum open-access model. The journal is published by Ruhr-Universität Bochum; the managing director and publishing editor is Tim Güneysu. This is the first year HotCRP was adopted as submission and review system. Despite some learning mistakes and per-deadline adjustments due to a still-evolving platform, the experiment was rather successful. One major feature still lacking from these review systems is the ability to deal with resubmissions and the administrative overhead it creates for the program chairs to keep track of previous reviewers and discussions. To help the rebuttal process and aid the authors in deciding what to focus on while preparing their answer, we opted to include a section in the review form where reviewers could ask questions they deemed most important, with the goal to receive answers in the rebuttal. Since it was an all-virtual and world-wide event, the conference presentations themselves were limited to five minutes; the full twenty-minute presentations were pre-recorded and made available online for people to enjoy at their own leisure.