Anyone have an interesting BoF topic?

[D. J. Bernstein]

Once upon a time, Crypto had "Birds of a Feather" sessions (BoFs): John Kelsey's hash-function BoF in 2005, for example, or Matt Blaze's classic lock-picking BoF. This was a recognized and important part of the program: "Birds of a Feather sessions provide an opportunity for people to gather around and discuss common interests." There was a natural time for these BoFs: the free afternoon on Tuesday, a comfortable several-hour span between lunch and dinner (and the evening rump session).

Unfortunately, it seems that the free afternoon has been lost, and that the BoFs have been lost with it. The main Crypto 2011 program included an invited three-hour tutorial on fully homomorphic encryption and couldn't find anywhere to put it other than Tuesday afternoon. The main Crypto 2012 program fills up Tuesday afternoon with "Composable security" and "Pinning down 'privacy' in statistical databases".

Fortunately, we---the applied cryptographers coming to Crypto---can run our own BoFs without permission from the organizers. We need volunteers to propose BoF topics, and we need people to speak up and say which topics they're most interested in, but we don't need free time in the official program. All we need is to find a stretch of official talks that we won't be listening to anyway.

For example, I've already seen quite a bit of discussion of the "Public keys" paper (aka "Ron was wrong, Whit is right") and the "Mining your ps and qs" paper at USENIX (see factorable.net), and I bet that quite a few people at Crypto would be interested in a randomness-generation BoF: chatting about /dev/urandom, the Windows equivalent, RDRAND, what libraries should do, what applications should do, etc. After the "Public keys" talk on Wednesday there seems to be a non-applied session stretching from 15:30 (after coffee break) to 16:50 (start of business meeting); if the BoF meets in Anacapa (10 minutes from Campbell) then it can still cover an hour, 15:40 to 16:40. Any thoughts?

---Dan