Preface, CHES 2006, Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems

These are the proceedings of the eighth Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES 2006) held in Yokohama, Japan from October 10 to 13, 2006. The CHES workshop has been sponsored by the International Association for Cryptographic Research (IACR) since 2004. The first and the second CHES workshops were held in Worcester in 1999 and 2000, respectively, followed by Paris in 2001, San Francisco Bay Area in 2002, Cologne in 2003, Boston in 2004 and Edinburgh in 2005. This is the first CHES workshop held in Asia.

This year, a total of 112 paper submissions were received. The review process was therefore a delicate and challenging task for the program committee members. Each paper was carefully read by at least three reviewers, and submissions with a program committee member as a (co-)author by at least five reviewers. The review process concluded with a two week web discussion process which resulted in 32 papers being selected for presentation. Unfortunately, there were a number of good papers that could not be included in the program due to a lack of space. We would like to thank all the authors who submitted papers to CHES 2006.

In addition to regular presentations, we were very fortunate to have in the program three excellent invited talks given by Kazumaro Aoki (NTT) on ``Integer Factoring Utilizing PC Cluster", Ari Juels (RSA Labs) on ``The Outer Limits of RFID Security'' and Ahmad Sadeghi (Ruhr University Bochum) on ``Challenges for Trusted Computing''. The program also included a rump session, chaired by Christof Paar, featuring informal presentations on recent results.

We are very grateful to the program committee members and to the external reviewers for their hard work. Special thanks are also due to the members of the local committee:
Akashi Satoh (Secretary - IBM Japan Ltd.),
Toru Akishita (Sony Corporation), Tetsuya Izu (Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.),
Masanobu Koike (Toshiba Solutions Corporation),
Natsume Matsuzaki (Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.),
Shiho Moriai (Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.),
Sumio Morioka (NEC Corporation),
Hanae Nozaki (Toshiba Corporation),
Kenji Ohkuma (IPA),
Katsuyuki Okeya (Hitachi Ltd.),
Shunsuke Ota (Hitachi Ltd.),
Yasuyuki Sakai (Mitsubishi Electric Corporation),
Junji Shikata (Yokohama National University),
Daisuke Suzuki (Mitsubishi Electric Corporation),
Yukiyasu Tsunoo (NEC Corporation),
Takanari Ueno (IPA),
Takashi Watanabe (Hitachi Ltd.) and
Atsuhiro Yamagishi (IPA), for their strong supports.

Special thanks go to Tsutomu Matsumoto, the general chair and local organizer for his extensive efforts to bring the workshop to the beautiful historic city of Yokohama, Japan. The publicity chair çetin Kaya Koç was always very helpful and patient at all stages of the organization. Jens-Peter Kaps helped us as our dedicated webmaster for maintaining the web review system.

We would also thank the corporate financial supporters, Cryptography Research, Inc., RSA Security Japan Ltd., Fujitsu Limited, IBM Corporation, Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA), Initiative for Research on Information Security, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, NTT Corporation, Renesas Technology Corp., Toshiba Corporation and Yokohama National University. Obviously CHES2006 was not possible without these supporters.

Lastly we would like to thank the CHES steering committee members for their hearty supports and giving us the honor of serving for such an prestigious conference.