Preface, IACR CRYPTO 2012

CRYPTO 2012, the 32nd Annual International Cryptology Conference, was held August 19-23 on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The event was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (the IACR) in cooperation with the UCSB Computer Science Department and the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Security and Privacy.

We received 225 submissions of which 48 were accepted for publication, a record number for IACR flagship conferences. This proceedings contains the revised versions of all the papers. One pair of papers shared a single presentation slot in the program (starred in Table of Content). There were also two invited talks. On Monday, Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law and Computer Science at Harvard University, gave a talk entitled "The End of Crypto". On Wednesday, Ernie Brickell, Chief Security Architect for Intel Corporation, spoke about "Recent Advances and Existing Research Questions in Platform Security". To accommodate the increase in the number of accepted papers, one paper presentation session was planned on the traditionally free Tuesday afternoon. This session was followed by a tutorial session on differential privacy, entitled "Pinning Down 'Privacy' in Statistical Databases: A Tutorial", delivered by Adam Smith. The rump session was as usual on Tuesday evening, and chaired by Dan Bernstein and Tanja Lange.

Our goal was to have a technical program that is strong and representative of the diversity and breadth of cryptologic research. Towards this goal we took a number of steps including selecting a large program committee with diverse research interest and experience, and in the Call for Papers, encouraging submissions in all areas of cryptology with emphasis on innovative application and approaches. Papers were reviewed double-blind, with non-PC member papers assigned to three reviewers, and PC member papers to four reviewers. During the discussion phase, when necessary, extra reviews were solicited. As part of paper discussion phase we held a PC meeting at Cambridge, UK, collocated with Eurocrypt 2012.

We ensured that all papers received fair and objective evaluation by experts and also a broader group of PC members, with particular attention paid to highlighting strengths and weaknesses of papers. The final decisions were made based on the reviews and discussion, and in the case of two "equal" papers, taking other factors such as balance of the program into account. In the case of ambiguity we relayed questions of reviewers to authors, and delivered back the responses, with all communications anonymized. The task of paper selection was especially challenging given the high number of strong submissions. In the end, a sizable number of strong papers could not be included in the program for lack of space.

For the Best Paper Award, the PC overwhelmingly selected "Efficient Dissection of Composite Problems, with Applications to Cryptanalysis, Knapsacks, and Combinatorial Search Problems", by Itai Dinur, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, and Adi Shamir . The Committee praised the work for important cryptographic applications in symmetric cryptography and public-key cryptography, as well as applications to other combinatorial problems.

We would like to sincerely thank authors of all submissions -- those whose paper made it into the program and those whose papers did not. We and the PC as a whole, were impressed by the quality of submissions contributed from all around the world. This although made the task of selecting the final list very challenging, gave us the opportunity to have a very strong and diverse program.

Our sincere gratitude also goes out to the Program Committee. We were extremely fortunate that so many brilliant people put such an inordinate amount of time not only in writing reviews, but also actively participating in discussions for a period of nearly six weeks. They responded promptly to our requests for extra reviews, opinions, comments, comparisons and inputs. We were extremely impressed by the knowledge, dedication and integrity of our PC. We are also indebted to the many external reviewers who significantly contributed to the comprehensive evaluation of papers. A list of PC members and external reviewers appears after this note. Despite all our efforts, the list of external reviewers may have errors or omissions and we apologize for that.

We would like to thank Yiqun Lisa Yin, the General Chair, for working closely with us throughout the whole process, providing the much needed support in every step, including creating and maintaining the website, and planning and organizing the logistic of the PC meeting and the conference.

We benefited enormously from advices and feedbacks of the past CRYPTO Program Chairs, Phil Rogaway, Tal Rabin, and Shai Halevi. They generously shared with us their experiences that enabled us to take more informed decisions. Shai Halevi also provided us with unlimited support of his software websubrev that we used for the whole conference planning, paper evaluation, and interaction with PC members and authors. Josh Benaloh, was our IACR point of contact, always providing timely and informative answers to our questions. Alfred Hofmann and his colleagues at Springer provided a meticulous service for the timely production of this volume.

We would like to thank Google, Microsoft Research, Qualcomm, RIM and Voltage Security for their generous support.

Serving as CRYPTO Program co-Chairs was a privilege and also a great challenge. This was the first year that CRYPTO was to implement co-Chairing, with Rei serving as senior co-chair, having tie-breaker decision role. Despite many unknowns and the need for extra effort to define the processes and order of things in co-Chairing, in the end it was a great opportunity to work together and build on our strengths. We are happy that we took the challenge, and along the way found new friendships in addition to the running of the conference.

June 2012                              Rei Safavi-Naini
Ran Canetti

Program co-Chairs
CRYPTO 2012