Preface, Asiacrypt 2007

ASIACRYPT 2007 was held in Kuching, Sarawak, MALAYSIA, during December 2-6, 2007. This was the 13th ASIACRYPT conference, and was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), in cooperation with the Information Security Research (iSECURES) Lab of Swinburne University of Technology (Sarawak Campus) and the Sarawak Development Institute (SDI); and financially supported by the Sarawak Government. The General Chair was Raphael Phan and I had the privilege of serving as the Program Chair.

The conference received 223 submissions (from which one submission was withdrawn). Each paper was reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee, while submissions co-authored by the Program Committee member were reviewed by at least five members. (Each PC member could submit at most one paper.) Many high-quality papers were submitted, but due to the relatively small number which could be accepted, many very good papers had to be rejected. After 11 weeks of review process, the Program Committee selected 33 papers for presentation (two papers were merged). The proceedings contains the revised versions of the accepted papers. These revised papers were not subject to editorial review and the authors bear full responsibility for their contents.

The committee selected the following two papers as the best papers: "Cryptanalysis of Grindahl" by Thomas Peyrin; and "Faster Addition and Doubling on Elliptic Curves" by Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange. Authors of these two papers received invitation to submit the full version of their paper to the Journal of Cryptology. The author of the first paper, Thomas Peyrin, received the Best Paper Award.

The conference featured invited lectures by Ran Canetti and Tatsuaki Okamoto. Ran Canetti's paper "Treading the Impossible: A Tour of Set-Up Assumptions for Obtaining Universally Composable Security" and Tatsuaki Okamoto's paper "Authenticated Key Exchange and Key Encapsulation in the Standard Model" have been included in this proceedings.

There are many people who contributed to the success of ASIACRYPT 2007. I would like to thank many authors from around the world for submitting their papers. I am deeply grateful to the Program Committee for their hard work to ensure that each paper received a thorough and fair review. I gratefully acknowledge the external reviewers listed on the following pages. I am also grateful to Arjen Lenstra, Bart Preneel and Andy Clark for their advice as the directors of IACR. Finally, I would like to thank the General Chair, Raphael Phan, for organizing the conference and Shai Halevi for developing and maintaining his very nice Web Submission and Review System.