IACR CRYPTO 2009, Preface

CRYPTO 2009, the 29th Annual International Cryptology Conference, was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) 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. The conference was held in Santa Barbara, California, on August 16-20, 2009, and John Black served as the General Chair. The program committee consisted of 29 members and two advisory members, whose names are listed on the next page, and I had the privilege of serving as the program chair.

The conference received 213 submissions. The program committee, aided by 217 external reviewers, reviewed all these submissions and discussed them in depth. After an intensive review period of 11 weeks, the committee accepted 40 of these submissions. Two pairs of submissions were merged, yielding a total of 38 papers in the technical program of the conference. These proceedings include the revised versions of the 38 papers that were presented at the conference. These revised papers were not subject to editorial review and the authors bear full responsibility for their contents. The best-paper award was awarded to the paper "Short Chosen-Prefix Collisions for MD5 and the Creation of a Rogue CA Certificate" by Stevens, Sotirov, Appelbaum, Lenstra, Molnar, Osvik, and de Weger.

The conference featured two invited lectures: one by Ed Felten and the other by Ueli Maurer. An abstract of Maurer's talk, titled "Abstraction in Cryptography", is included in these proceedings. The program also included a Rump session, featuring short informal talks on recent results and work in progress.

I wish to thank all the authors who submitted their work to CRYPTO 2009. We received a large number of high-quality submissions, and even though we accepted more submissions than usual, there were still many good submissions that we just could not fit in the program (but surely they will be published elsewhere). I am proud to be working in a field that consistently produces such strong results.

I owe a debt of gratitude to members of the program committee for their outstanding work. Evaluating such a large number of submissions in the short review period is very demanding, and the committee members contributed their knowledge and time to ensure that all submissions are reviewed in depth. Many thanks also to all the external reviewers who helped us with this task. I also thank Christof Paar, Christopher Wolf, and Alexander May for their help with organizing the PC meeting. And of course, I am thankful for the support that I received from all the members of the Cryptography group in IBM Watson: Rosario Gennaro, Craig Gentry, Charanjit Jutla, Jonathan Katz, Hugo Krawczyk, Tal Rabin, and Vinod Vaikuntanathan.

June 2009                         Shai Halevi