Ten Reasons why a Paper is Rejected from a Crypto Conference
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The paper doesn't use TeX.
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The authors do not understand the question. For example they claim to construct a block cipher but the construction is not even stateless. Or the paper does not mention what the algorithm is supposed to achieve (is this an encryption algorithm ?).
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The paper does not provide any security analysis; or the paper only considers exhaustive search.
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The paper does not provide a security proof when such proof would be required. A public-key protocol based on lower level crypto primitives must have a security proof, based on a well defined notion of security; otherwise it is basically useless.
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There is no comparison with the state of the art. For example the paper proposes a stream cipher that is 1000 slower than existing ones.
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The approach conflicts with a known impossibility result (which is never mentioned in the paper). The easiest case is an information theoretically secure encryption scheme with a key shorter than the message.
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The paper cryptanalyzes itself. The paper mentions an attack against a previous version of the algorithm that still applies to the new version.
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The paper makes claims without proofs. The authors claim to have a polynomial time factoring algorithm but they do not provide the factorisation of any large integer; or the proof is postponed to an ``extended version'' of the paper.
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The paper uses a technique that was proven many times unsuccessful in the cryptographic literature (e.g., ``chaos functions'') but the authors do not explain why their approach is better.
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Finally, the techniques used in the paper do not seem to apply to the problem at hand, which makes the result difficult to believe. For example the paper tries to factor N=pq by writing it as a set of binary equations over the bits of p and q. Or the authors try to use cellular automata to build a public-key encryption scheme.
This list was inspired by Scott Aaronson's
Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong.
