IACR Test of Time Award

The IACR Test of Time Award is given annually for each one of the three IACR general conferences (Asiacrypt, Crypto, and Eurocrypt). An award will be given at a conference for a paper which has had a lasting impact on the field and was published 15 years prior. More information about the Test of Time Award can be found in the policy guidelines document.

CHES, TCC, and PKC each have their own Test of Time Award for papers published at these conferences. These awards follow slightly different policies, available at their respective websites above.

Nominations and Contact Information

Each year in the spring, you can nominate a paper for the Test of Time Award. The chair of the Test of Time Award committee can be reached by email at .

2026

From Eurocrypt 2011

Semi-homomorphic Encryption and Multiparty Computation by Rikke Bendlin, Ivan Damgård, Claudio Orlandi, and Sarah Zakarias

For pioneering the use of homomorphic information-theoretic MACs in MPC and inspiring numerous breakthroughs in both information-theoretic and computational MPC.

Faster Explicit Formulas for Computing Pairings over Ordinary Curves by Diego F. Aranha, Koray Karabina, Patrick Longa, Catherine H. Gebotys, and Julio López

For defining the key aspects of efficient pairing implementations on ordinary curves and introducing algorithmic techniques that have been widely adopted in subsequent research.

2025

From Asiacrypt 2010

Constant-Size Commitments to Polynomials and Their Applications by Aniket Kate, Gregory M. Zaverucha, and Ian Goldberg

For introducing the first constant-size polynomial commitment scheme, a cornerstone of modern succinct zero-knowledge proofs.

From Crypto 2010

Factorization of a 768-bit RSA modulus by Thorsten Kleinjung, Kazumaro Aoki, Jens Franke, Arjen K. Lenstra, Emmanuel Thomé, Joppe W. Bos, Pierrick Gaudry, Alexander Kruppa, Peter L. Montgomery, Dag Arne Osvik, Herman te Riele, Andrey Timofeev, and Paul Zimmermann

For the landmark factorization of a 768-bit RSA modulus, guiding the deprecation of RSA-1024 and advancing practical cryptanalysis.

Cryptographic Extraction and Key Derivation: The HKDF Scheme by Hugo Krawczyk

For formalizing key derivation and introducing HKDF, a widely adopted and standardized extract-then-expand scheme.

From Eurocrypt 2010

On Ideal Lattices and Learning with Errors over Rings by Vadim Lyubashevsky, Chris Peikert and Oded Regev

For introducing the Ring-LWE problem, laying the theoretical and practical foundation for efficient lattice-based cryptography.

2024

From Asiacrypt 2009

Fiat-Shamir with aborts:Applications to lattice and factoring-based signatures by Vadim Lyubashevsky

For inventing the abort technique in the Fiat-Shamir transformation, which became the foundation of the NIST-standardized Dilithium lattice-based signature scheme.

Efficient public key encryption based on ideal lattices by Damien Stehlé, Ron Steinfeld, Keisuke Tanaka and Keita Xagawa

For introducing the first efficient public-key encryption scheme with security based on the worst-case hardness of the approximate Shortest Vector Problem in structured ideal lattices.

From Crypto 2009

Dual-System Encryption by Brent Waters

For introducing the dual-system technique, breaking through the partitioning-reductions barrier of pairing-based cryptography and enabling new and improved pairing-based cryptosystems.

Reconstructing RSA Private Keys from Random Key Bits by Nadia Heninger and Hovav Shacham

For introducing the go-to tool for side channel attacks on CRT-RSA that played a pivotal role in helping secure the Internet.

From Eurocrypt 2009

A Unified Framework for the Analysis of Side-Channel Key Recovery Attacks by François-Xavier Standaert, Tal G. Malkin and Moti Yung

For introducing a structured approach for evaluation of side-channel attacks and countermeasures and for inspiring further connections between the theory of leakage-resilient cryptography and the practice of defending implementations against side-channels attacks.

2023

From Asiacrypt 2008

Preimage Attacks on 3, 4, and 5-Pass HAVAL by Kazumaro Aoki and Yu Sasaki

For providing new attack frameworks in symmetric-key cryptanalysis by formally introducing the Meet-in-the-Middle Preimage Attacks against hash functions, which was later generalized into key-recovery attacks against block ciphers, and collision attacks against hash functions.

From Crypto 2008

A Framework for Efficient and Composable Oblivious Transfer by Chris Peikert, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, and Brent Waters

For the creation of a simple framework for achieving efficient UC composable protocols that can be realized under a variety of concrete assumptions, introducing a powerful notion of dual-mode encryption and allowing for the first time to create bandwidth efficient Regev encryption.

From Eurocrypt 2008

Efficient Non-interactive Proof Systems for Bilinear Groups by Jens Groth and Amit Sahai

For providing efficient Groth-Sahai proofs that have given rise to many applications including succinct non-interactive arguments.

On the Indifferentiability of the Sponge Construction by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michael Peeters, and Gilles Van Assche

For introducing the Sponge construction that is deployed in world-wide standards such as SHA-3 and ASCON.

2022

From Asiacrypt 2007

Faster Addition and Doubling on Elliptic Curves by Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange

For introducing efficient elliptic curve addition formulae in the context of Edwards forms of elliptic curves.

From Crypto 2007

Deterministic and Efficiently Searchable Encryption by Mihir Bellare, Alexandra Boldyreva, and Adam O'Neill

For placing searchable encryption on a rigorous footing, leading to a huge interest in this field in applications.

From Eurocrypt 2007

An Efficient Protocol for Secure Two-Party Computation in the Presence of Malicious Adversaries by Yehuda Lindell and Benny Pinkas

For providing the first implementable protocol for actively secure variants of Yao's protocol, and thus paving the way to more practical constructions.

2021

From Asiacrypt 2006

Simulation-sound NIZK proofs for a practical language and constant size group signatures by Jens Groth

For constructing asymptotically optimal NIZK proofs and group signatures without using random oracles, and paving the way to practical constructions.

From Crypto 2006

New proofs for NMAC and HMAC: Security without collision-resistance by Mihir Bellare

For proving that the security of the widely deployed HMAC construction does not depend on the collision resistance of the underlying hash function.

From Eurocrypt 2006

A provable-security treatment of the key-wrap problem by Phillip Rogaway and Thomas Shrimpton

For placing the important real world primitive of key-wrapping on a solid theoretic foundation.

2020

From Asiacrypt 2005

Discrete-Log-Based Signatures May Not Be Equivalent to Discrete Log by Pascal Paillier and Damien Vergnaud

For developing a new meta-reduction approach in the security proof of cryptosystems.

From Crypto 2005

Finding collisions in the full SHA-1 by Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin and Hongbo Yu

For a breakthrough in the cryptanalysis of hash functions.

From Eurocrypt 2005

Fuzzy Identity-Based Encryption by Amit Sahai and Brent Waters

For laying the foundations of attribute-based encryption and other advanced notions of encryption.

2019

From Asiacrypt 2004

How Far Can We Go Beyond Linear Cryptanalysis? by Thomas Baignères, Pascal Junod, and Serge Vaudenay

For introducing new techniques in linear cryptanalysis of block ciphers.

From Crypto 2004

Multicollisions in Iterated Hash Functions. Application to Cascaded Constructions by Antoine Joux

For the development of an important attack on a widely-used class of collision resistant hash functions.

From Eurocrypt 2004

Fuzzy Extractors: How to Generate Strong Keys from Biometrics and Other Noisy Data by Yevgeniy Dodis, Leonid Reyzin, and Adam D. Smith

For introducing new techniques for entropy extraction from noisy data. The full version of this Eurocrypt 2004 paper was later published in the SIAM Journal on Computing, 38 (1), 97-139, 2008, together with Rafail Ostrovsky as an additional author. The authors gratefully acknowledge his contribution to their joint work.