IACR ASIACRYPT 2009, Preface

ASIACRYPT 2009, the 15th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security was held in Tokyo, Japan, during December 6 - 10, 2009. The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) in cooperation with Technical Group on Information Security (ISEC) of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE). ASIACRYPT 2009 was chaired by Eiji Okamoto and I had the honor of serving as the Program Chair.

The conference received 300 submissions from which 2 papers were withdrawn. Each paper was assigned at least three reviewers, and papers co-authored by Program Committee members were assigned at least five reviewers. We spent eight weeks for the review process, which consisted of two stages. In the first four-week stage, each Program Committee member individually read and evaluated assigned papers (individual review phase), and in the second four-week stage, the papers were scrutinized with an extensive discussion (discussion phase). The review reports and discussion comments reached a total of 50000 lines.

Finally the Program Committee decided to accepted 42 submissions, of which two submissions were merged into one paper. As a result, 41 presentations were given at the conference. The authors of the accepted papers had four weeks to prepare final versions for these proceedings. These revised papers were not subject to editorial review and the authors bear full responsibility for their contents. Unfortunately there were a number of good papers that could not be included in the program due to this year's tough competition.

Tatsuaki Okamoto delivered the 2009 IACR Distinguished Lecture. The Program Committee decided to give the Best Paper Award of ASIACRYPT 2009 to the following paper: "Improved generic algorithms for 3-collisions" by Antoine Joux and Stefan Lucks. They received an invitation to submit a full version to the Journal of Cryptology . In addition to the papers included in this volume, the conference also featured a rump session, a forum for short and entertaining presentations on recent works of both a technical and non-technical nature.

There are many people who contributed to the success of ASIACRYPT 2009. First I would like to thank all authors for submitting their papers to the conference. I am deeply grateful to the Program Committee for giving their time, expertise and enthusiasm in order to ensure that each paper received a thorough and fair review. Thanks also to 303 external reviewers, listed on the following papers, for contributing their time and expertise. Finally, I would like to thank Shai Halevi for maintaining his excellent Web Submission and Review Software. Without this system, which covers all processes from paper submission to preparation of the proceedings, I could not have handled 300 papers so smoothly.