Preface, IACR ASIACRYPT 2006

ASIACRYPT 2006 was held in Shanghai, China, from Dec. 3 to Dec. 7, 2006. This is the 12th annual ASIACRYPT conference, and was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), in cooperation with the State Key Labs. of Information Security, Chinese Academy of Sciences (LOIS), Lab for Cryptography and Information Security, Shanghai Jiaotong University (CIS/SJTU) and Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).

This year we received a recording number of 314 submissions, of which 303 regular submissions were reviewed by 32 members of the program committee, with the help of 250 external referees. After a two-month review process, the program committee selected 30 papers for presentation. This volume of proceedings contains the revised version of the 30 selected papers. The IACR 2006 distinguished lecture by Ivan Damgaard was also in the program. The paper "Finding SHA-1 Characteristics" by Christophe De Canniére and Christian Rechberger received the best paper award.

The reviewing process was a challenging task, and we had to reject many good submissions that could have been accepted under normal circumstances. I am very grateful to program committee for their efforts to carry out this challenging task and to keep the high standard of ASIACRYPT conference. We gratefully acknowledge our 250 external referees, without your help it could be infeasible to provide 1008 high-quality, often extensive, reviews. More importantly, I would like to thank all the authors who submitted their work to ASIACRYPT 2006.

This year submissions were processed using Web-based software iChair, here I'd like to thank Thomas Baigneres, Matthieu Finiasz and Serge Vaudenay by providing this valuable tool. I am grateful to prof. Ruimin Shen for his generous and indispensable support and I would like to thank Changzhe Gao, Haining Lu and Jingjing Wu of for the smooth operation of our web-sites.

I would like to thank the General Chair, Prof. Dingyi Pei, for organizing the conference; the Organization Chair, Prof. Kefei Chen, for taking over all the hard tasks and preparing these proceedings;

Last but most, my thanks to all the participants at the ASIACRYPT 2006 conference.

September 2006           Xuejia Lai