The 15th International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES 2013) was held at Santa Barbara, California, USA, during August 20-23, 2013. The workshop was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research.

CHES 2013 received 132 submissions. The 43 members of the Program Committee were assisted by more than 190 external reviewers. In total, they delivered 463 reviews. Each submission was reviewed by at least three Program Committee members. Submissions by Program Committee members received at least five reviews. The review process was double-blind, and conflicts of interest were carefully handled. Eventually, the Program Committee selected 27 papers (a 20% acceptance rate) for publication in the proceedings.

CHES 2013 used, for the second time, an author rebuttal. After five weeks of individual review, and a week of initial online discussions, the reviews were forwarded to the submitting authors. The authors were invited to provide a textonly rebuttal of no more than 3000 characters. The rebuttals were then included in the online discussion system, to guide the paper decision process in three additional weeks of online discussion.

The program also included two invited talks, by John Kelsey from NIST, and by Adam Langley from Google (joint with CRYPTO 2013). For the second time, the program included two tutorials on cryptographic engineering aimed at newcomers in CHES. The tutorials were given by Emmanuel Prouff from the French Network and Information Security Agency, France, and by Colin O'Flynn from Dalhousie University, Canada. The CHES 2013 Best Paper Award went to Thomaz Oliveira, Julio López, Diego F. Aranha and Francisco Rodríguez-Henríquez for their paper "Lambda coordinates for binary elliptic curves".

Many people contributed to CHES 2013. We thank the authors for contributing their excellent research, and for participating in the rebuttal process. We thank the Program Committee members, and their external reviewers, for making a significant effort over an extended period of time to select the right papers for the program.

We particularly thank Stefan Mangard, the Chair of the CHES Steering Committee, and Çetin Kaya Koç and Thomas Eisenbarth, the General Co-chairs, who took care of many practical details of the event. We are very grateful to Shai Halevi, who wrote the review software. The website was maintained by Jens Peter Kaps; we appreciate his support throughout CHES. Finally, we thank our sponsors for supporting CHES financially: Cryptography Research, CryptoExperts, Infineon, Intrinsic ID, MicroSemi, NXP, Oberthur, Riscure, Sakura, Secure IC and Technicolor.

June 2013                             Guido Bertoni
Jean-Sébastien Coron