IACR Crypto 2002 Preface

Crypto 2002, the 22nd Annual Crypto Conference, was sponsored by IACR, the International Association for Cryptologic Research, in cooperation with the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy and the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara. It is published as Volume 2442 of the Lecture Notes In Computer Science (LNCS) of Springer Verlag. Note that 2002, 22 and 2442 are all palindromes... (Don't nod!)

The conference received 175 submissions, of which 40 were accepted; two submissions were merged into a single paper, yielding the total of 39 papers accepted for presentation in the technical program of the conference. In this proceedings volume you will find the revised versions of the 39 papers that were presented at the conference. The submissions represent the current state of work in the cryptographic community world-wide, covering all areas of cryptologic research. In fact, many high-quality works (that surely will be published elsewhere) could not be accepted. This is due to the competitive nature of the conference and the challenging task of selecting a program. I wish to thank the authors of all submitted papers. Indeed, it is the authors of all papers who have made this conference possible, regardless of whether or not their papers were accepted.

The conference program was also immensely benefited by two plenary talks. The first invited talk was by Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, who spoke on "New Directions in Quantum Cryptographic Protocols." In the second talk, David Chaum gave the 2002 IACR Distinguished Lecture, entitled "Privacy Technology: A Survey of Security without Identification."

My deepest thanks go to the program committee members. Serving on a program committee seems, at times, like a thankless job. When a paper is accepted certain people may believe it is due to the paper's intrinsic quality, whereas when a paper is rejected it is attributed to the misjudgment of committee members. The demanding nature of the task of careful evaluation and selection is, at times, easily forgotten. In reality, the reviewing process for this conference was a huge challenge that demanded from committee members top-level scientific capabilities, combined with a lot of time-consuming hard work. Each paper was reviewed by at least three members, and some papers (including those submitted by committee members) were reviewed by as many as six reviewers. The process followed the review directives of IACR. We reached our decisions via electronic discussions and in a meeting of the program committee; this was a tough job whose successful completion should be credited to each and every committee member. We were assisted by the program committee's advisory members, as well as by an army of external reviewers whose expertise and help is highly appreciated. Their names are given in a separate list. (I apologize for any possible omission.)

The conference was run by Rebecca Wright, who served as the general chair. I thank her for all her work, and in particular for her continuous assistance to the program committee and the program chair. Some of the committee members as well as other members of the community served as session chairs during the conference, and I thank them for their help in running the program. The conference program also included the traditional Rump Session, chaired by Stuart Haber, featuring short informal talks on recently completed research and work in progress.

The committee task was an international effort (as befits the IACR, where the "I" stands for "International"). We had members from all over the world, a chair in the USA, a program committee meeting in the Netherlands and a web server in Belgium. We utilized Internet technology as much as we could. This was possible due to efforts by a number of individuals. I thank Berry Schoenmakers for making all the necessary local arrangements for the Program Committee meeting in Amsterdam (just before Eurocrypt 2002). I thank Bart Preneel, and his great team at K.U. Leuven, Thomas Herlea and Wim Moreau, who administered the submission and web-review software. Their support has been instrumental. I thank my Ph.D. student Aggelos Kiayias, who served as a technical assistant to the chairs and helped me with the various technical and technological aspects of running the committee and preparing the conference proceedings. Further thanks are due to Bart Preneel, Wim Moreau and Joris Claessens for authoring the web-review software that was used in the refereeing process, and to Chanathip Namprempre, Sam Rebelsky and the SIGACT's Electronic Publishing Board, for authoring the software for the electronic submissions. Thanks are also due to the publisher, Springer Verlag.

To summarize, I benefited greatly from the pleasant and effective working relationships that I enjoyed with the many individuals I had to collaborate with in order to make the program possible, and it was a real learning experience. Indeed, the making of a program for a conference such as Crypto 2002 is an effort that requires a lot of work from a lot of individuals. Fortunately, the IACR and the cryptographic community at large form the active, strong, vibrant and relevant community that supports our successful conferences. Long live Crypto!