IACR ASIACRYPT 2003 Preface

ASIACRYPT 2003 was held in Taipei, Taiwan, from Nov.30 to Dec.4, 2003. The ninth annual ASIACRYPT conference was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), this year in cooperation with the Chinese Cryptology and Information Security Association (CCISA) and National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) in Taiwan.

There were 188 papers from 26 countries submitted to ASIACRYPT 2003 and 33 (of which one paper was withdrawn by the authors after notification) of these were selected for presentation. These proceedings contain revised versions of the accepted papers. We had IACR 2003 Distinguished Lecture, Dr. Don Coppersmith, entitled "Solving Low Degree Polynomials". In addition, two invited talks were given at the conference. One was given by Dr. Adi Shamir. The other one was given by Dr. Hon-Sen Yan, entitled "The Secret and Beauty of Ancient Chinese Locks". The conference program also included a rump session, chaired by Tzong Chen Wu, which featured short informal talks on recent results.

It was a pleasure for me to work with the program committee, which was composed by 27 members from 17 countries. Thanks for working very hard over several months. As the matter of fact, the review process was a challenging and time-consuming task, and it lasted about 8 weeks and more than half month for discussions among program committee members. All submissions were anonymously reviewed by at least 3 members in the relevant areas of the program committee; in some cases, particularly for those papers submitted by a member of program committee were reviewed by at least six members. We are grateful to all the program committee members who put a lot of efforts and precious time to give their expert analysis and comments on the submissions. Besides, we really appreciate the external referees who contributed with their expertise to the reviewing process. Without their help, the selection process cannot go so smoothly.

All paper submissions to ASIACRYPT 2003 were received electronically using the web based submission software, which has been provided by Chanathip Namprempre. The review software was kindly provided by Bart Preneel, Wim Moreau, and Joris Claessens. I would like to thank Chien-Pang Kuo for his help in installing, solving problems we had with the software. I am also very grateful to Yi-Zhen Lin for her great help in handling ASIACRYPT 2003 affairs.

Special thanks to Yuliang Zheng, who acted as Advisory Member of the committee and provided advice based on his previous experience. I would also like to thank the chair of IACR, Andy Clark, who gave me valuable advice on all kinds of problems.

For financial support of the conference, we are very grateful to this year's sponsors, such as National Science Council, Ministry of Education, The Directorate General of Telecommunications, R.O.C., Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd., Institute for Information Industry, Computer & Communications Research Labs, ITRI, etc.

Finally, we would like to thank all those people who provide any assistance. Besides, also thanks to all the authors who submitted their papers to ASIACRYPT 2003 as well as all the participants from all over the world.