Preface, Crypto 2006

These are the proceedings of Crypto 2006, the 26th Annual International Cryptology Conference. The conference was sponsored by the International Association of 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, Santa Barbara. The conference was held in Santa Barbara, California, August 20-24, 2006.

The conference received 220 submissions, out of which the program committee selected 34 for presentation. Submission and selection of papers was done using the IChair sofware, developed at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) by Thomas Baignéres and Matthieu Finiasz. Aided in part by comments from the committee and external reviewers, the authors of accepted papers had roughly six weeks in which to prepare final versions for these proceedings. These were not subject to editorial review.

The committee chose "On the Power of the Randomized Iterate," by Iftach Haitner, Danny Harnik, and Omer Reingold, to receive the Best Paper award.

The committee also invited Oded Regev and David Wagner to speak on topics of their choice. Their talks were entitled, respectively, "Lattice-Based Cryptography" and "Cryptographic Protocols for Electronic Voting."

We continued the tradition of a "Rump Session" of very brief presentations.

The cryptology community provides a collaborative and supportive environment for exciting research, and the success of previous Crypto conferences fosters enthusiasm for participation in subsequent ones. I am deeply grateful to all the authors who submitted papers, not only for their contribution to this conference but also for maintaining this tradition.

I thank Thomas Baignéres and Matthieu Finiasz for kindly hosting the server -- and for writing IChair in the first place. David Fuchs provided invaluable assistance in assembling the final papers into this volume. Josh Benaloh was everything one could possibly hope for in a general chair. I thank him for his good judgement and gracious assistance at all times.

In a departure from recent tradition, submissions were not anonymous. I am grateful to Andy Clark and Kevin McCurley for their counsel regarding this course of action, and to the program committee for being open to change. I also warmly thank the members of the program committee for their energy, intelligence, wisdom, and the maturity with which they approached their task.

Finally, I thank Moni Naor, who for the past nineteen years has taught me cryptography.