Preface, Fast Software Encryption 2005

This Fast Software Encryption workshop 2005 was the twelfth in a series of annual workshops on symmetric cryptography, sponsored for the fourth year by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). The workshop concentrated on all aspects of fast primitives for symmetric cryptology, including the design, cryptanalysis and implementation of block and stream ciphers as well as hash functions and message authentication codes. The first FSE workshop was held in Cambridge in 1993, followed by Leuven in 1994, Cambridge in 1996, Haifa in 1997, Paris in 1998, Rome in 1999, New York in 2000, Yokohama in 2001, Leuven in 2002, Lund in 2003, and New Delhi in 2004.

This year, a total of 96 submissions were received. After an extensive review by the program committee, 30 submissions were accepted. Two of these submissions were merged into a single paper, yielding a total of 29 papers accepted for presentation at the workshop. Also, we were very fortunate to have in the program an invited talk by Xuejia Lai on "Attacks and Protection of Hash Functions" and a very entertaining rump session Bart Preneel kindly accepted to chair. These proceedings contain the revised versions of the accepted papers; the revised versions were not subsequently checked for correctness.

We are very grateful to the program committee members and to the external reviewers for their hard work. Each paper was refereed by at least three reviewers, and at least five reviewers in the case of papers (co-)authored by program committee members; eventually, an impressive total of 334 reviews was produced. Special thanks are also due to the members of the local organizing committee: Côme Berbain, Olivier Billet (who designed the FSE 2005 web pages and assembled the preproceedings), Julien Brouchier (who managed the submission and webreview servers), Stanislas Francfort, Aline Gouget, Françoise Levy, Pierre Loidreau, and Pascal Paillier (who managed on-site registration) for their generous efforts and strong support.

Many thanks to Kevin McCurley for handling the registration server, to Patrick Arditti, Virginie Berger and Claudine Campolunghi for providing assistance with the registration process, and to the research group COSIC of the K.U.Leuven for kindly providing their Webreview software.

Last but not least, we would like to thank the conference sponsors France Telecom, Gemplus, and Nokia for their financial support, DGA and ENSTA for hosting the conference on their premises, and all submitters and workshop participants who made this year's workshop such an enjoyable event.

April 2005             Henri Gilbert and Helena Handschuh