 So I thought my work as program chair was done and then I sort of remembered that it's a tradition of the outgoing program chair to give kind of a report about the conference and I guess for better or for worse it's supposed to be funny too. So the talk is half serious, half funny but I'm not going to tell you which is which so you can decide for yourselves and this has nothing to do with how unfunny it is so it's except for the last slide. So anyway first of all I want to start off with my own thank yous to Steve Myers who without whom this conference would not have happened so please give him another round of applause for the fantastic job. I would also like to thank take the opportunity to thank Chovav my program co-chair who was great working with you and of course without you it wouldn't have happened either so thank you and I meant to also thank I know he's not here but Matt Robshaw who was the program co-chair with me in 2016 also was great in showing me the ropes and guiding me through the process. Also it's a great opportunity to thank the excellent program committee I don't know how many are in the audience but we should all thank them for their efforts and the sub-reviewers as well they're all listed in the proceedings and you can take a look there were many papers submitted many reviews that were needed and so we really relied on all their effort to make the program you have today so we can thank them as well. Part of the tradition is to give some kind of a statistic about the conference and I you know I guess I didn't want to invest too much time in this so but I wanted to talk about the number of submissions so this year actually it turns out there were 311 submissions which is a record for crypto it's not a record for an ICR conference although it's pretty close but it is a record for crypto and it's actually up by 14 percent from last year and up by 84 percent from crypto 1999 so 1999 of course was the year that I first attended crypto so it's the one I benchmark mark all future cryptos by but anyway it's up 84 percent since 1999 and if we look actually at the growth in the number of submissions you know there's a little bit of fluctuation early on since 1999 but in recent years it's really just been steadily increasing it's actually something to think about this is a serious moment just because I know the security community is facing this issue as well with the large increase in the number of submissions how to deal with that the program committees have to be larger it's just something to keep in mind and I started wondering a little bit about why there's been this growth in the number of submissions and I hit upon at least one theory which seems to correlate pretty well with the rise in submissions and that's just the growth in studies of obfuscation so actually it's very interesting if you look back at the historical data so from 1999 to 2013 there were essentially zero papers about obfuscation I know there was one in 2001 maybe you can see it there in the noise I think there was one in 2013 as well 2014 through 2016 I actually don't have the complete data I only have the number of accepted papers on obfuscation so that's why there's a star but you can see there's a small handful of papers beginning in 2014 and this year the situation was markedly different we had 308 papers dealing with obfuscation in one way or the other so that was really a quite a challenge for the program committee to decide which ones to take the other three by the way we're on blockchain so as for the acceptance rate so we had 72 papers accepted there were two merges so we have 70 talks this is a 23% acceptance rate I'll just point out right that this is a little bit lower actually consciously so it's a little bit lower than what it was in 2013 through 2015 although it's higher than kind of the historical norm from 2011 to 2012 so you know that's around I think maybe the number of where where we should be you know plus or minus so I'm just gonna conclude I think I have a couple of minutes left I was just gonna say you know when I was a student I guess it was sort of a dream to be crypto program chair I don't know why but you know as a student the process was very mysterious actually and you know having been the program coach here in 2016 now 2017 I got to learn a lot about how things work from the from the inside and I thought maybe I could share and make it a little bit more transparent and tell you a little bit about how the the crypto conference works just so people can can know how things really how things really are so first of all you know it's amazing that it's an honor to serve on the PC so whenever you ask people to be on the PC they immediately accept and they're willing to put in the work in the hours and nobody turned us down for the invitations we had no children recruiting this this 45 person PC or whatever it was so that was really very interesting to see and so if any of you were asked you know please do the same and accept immediately now it was also great to see actually that as a chair you can follow this stuff so every PC member submitted all their reviews well in advance it was really quite incredible it allowed a lot of time for measured discussion of the various papers we didn't have anybody submitting their reviews after the decisions were made so it was really quite incredible to see the effort that the committee that the committee in the community no no this is how it really works this is what I learned actually and it's also quite impressive we have people with expertise in many different areas and so it turns out actually that all the reviews are correct and and it was really I tracked it and you know every time that somebody claimed that a result was trivial it was backed up extensively when a result was wrong they clearly pointed out the error and if a result you know was claimed to appear in a previous paper by the reviewer they put an explicit pointer to the exact place in their paper where it was done and in fact some reviewers were very thorough they did all three right in one review and it was really I think a very thorough very thorough job actually by many of the reviewers now you know they didn't tell me this actually when I agreed to be the chair but I I guess I just assumed that PC chairs are required actually to read all the submitted papers and so actually I just got through 2016 and so I I'm I'll get through 2017 by next crypto I promise so just you know one other thing I learned a little bit about the organization and Steve really gets a lot of the credit for this I it was amazing to see how things work right so all the clothing is ordered in the exact sizes and colors that everybody wants so that everybody gets the exact shirt that they that they would like to have I I don't know how how that happened and also you know as part of the planning we make sure that the invited speakers are confirmed well in advance of the of the conference so that there's there's no possibility of a mix up it's really quite impressive on a serious note I guess I would just like to say that it was an honor serving as the chair and on behalf of Chauvin myself we hope you enjoy the program as much as we had fun putting it together so thank you