Competing for Attention: An Interview Study with Participants of Cryptography Competitions

Cryptography competitions often contribute to the development and standardization of new cryptography. They help select primitives and algorithms that solve specific cryptographic problems securely and efficiently from a list of candidate submissions. Over the last decades, several competitions held by NIST and other research and regulatory organizations resulted in standards for, e.g., symmetric and asymmetric encryption, hashing, digital signatures, and, most recently, quantum secure cryptography. However, while these competitions fostered much technical research on the submitted schemes, little is currently known about the human aspects of cryptography competition processes, how they shape the competition results, and their perceived impact on cryptography security.