#Save the date, hand in a presentation, keep fingers crossed! – Klausis Krypto Kolumne

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The HistoCrypt, Europe’s leading conference on the history of cryptography, is one of my favorite events. The 2020 issue was supposed to take place in Budapest, Hungary, but it was canceled due to Covid-19. The conference proceedings have been published anyway. They are available online.

The HistoCrypt 2021

In spite of the on-going pandemy, the HistoCrypt team is working on a 2021 issue of the conference. Provided that events of this kind are going to be possible again, the HistoCrypt 2021 will take place from September 20-22 in Amsterdem, Netherlands. Check here for the conference website. The local organisation committee is chaired by my Dutch friend Karl de Leeuw.

Source: Schmeh

The Call for Papers for the HistoCrypt 2021 has recently been published. The deadline for submitting papers is February 21, 2021. The program committee, headed by Carola Dahlke from the Deutsches Museum in Munich, will select the best submissions until the end of April. There is also the possibility to hand in a workshop proposal.

To my regret, I can’t hand in a paper myself this time, as my office as the steering committee chair excludes me from doing so. My last HistoCrypt paper was about the Zschweigert cryptograph, a cipher machine from 1920. As the conference was canceled, I didn’t give a presentation, but I hope that I can catch up in the crypto-collectors group (ICCH) next year.

Should a physical meeting be impossible, it is planned to implement the HistoCrypt 2021 as a virtual meeting.

Previous HistoCrypts

The HistoCrypt has a history that goes back eight years:

• In 2012, I organized a meeting of crypto history enthusiasts in Heusenstamm, Germany (check here for a video). Our main guest was the legendary David Kahn.

Source: Schmeh

• In 2016 Arno Wacker and his team hosted the European Historic Ciphers Colloqium (Euro HCC) in Kassel, Germany.
• In 2017 another EuroHCC took place in Smolenice, Solvakia. It was the first event in this series that included a Call for Papers. The participants decided to change the name of the conference to “HistoCrypt”. This choice was made because the ending “crypt” is very popular for crypto conferences; examples include Eurocrypt, Asiacrypt, Indocrypt, and Netcrypt.

Source: Schmeh

• The first conference titled HistoCrypt took place in 2018 at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Source: Schmeh

Source: Schmeh

• The HistoCrypt 2020 was canceled due to Covid-19. As the accepted papers have been published anyway, the 2020 issue counts as the seventh conference in this series.

I hope to see many of my readers at the HistoCrypt 2021. I can only recommend to attend and to hand in a paper or workshop.
Follow @KlausSchmeh

Further reading: Photographs from the NSA Symposium on Cryptologic History

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