Preface to IACR CRYPTO: Advances in Cryptology (CRYPTO) 2016

The 36th International Cryptology Conference (Crypto 2016) was held at UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA, USA from August 14-18, 2016. The workshop was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research.

Crypto continues to grow. This year the program committee evaluated a record 274 submissions out of which 70 were chosen for inclusion in the program. Each paper was reviewed by at least three independent reviewers, with papers from program-committee members receiving at least five reviews. Reviewers with potential conflicts of interest for specific papers were excluded from all discussions about those papers, and this policy was extended to the program chairs as well.

The 44 members of the program committee were aided in this complex and time-consuming task by many external reviewers. We would like to thank them all for their service, their expert opinions, and their spirited contributions to the review process. It was a tremendously difficult task to choose the program for this conference, as the quality of the submissions was very high. It was even harder to identify a single best paper, but our congratulations go to Elette Boyle, Niv Gilboa, and Yuval Ishai from IDC Herzliya, Ben Gurion University, and the Technion, respectively, whose paper Breaking the Circuit Size Barrier for Secure Computation Under DDH was awarded Best Paper. Our congratulations also go to Mark Zhandry of MIT and Princeton University who won the award for the Best Student Paper The Magic of ELFs .

The invited speakers at Crypto 2016 were Brian Sniffen, Chief Security Architect at Akamai Technologies, Inc. and Paul Kocher, founder of Cryptography Research. Brian's presentation cast a fascinating light on the issues of real-world cryptographic deployment while Paul's presentation, a joint invitation from the program co-chairs of both Crypto 2016 and CHES 2016, marked 20 years since his publication of the first paper on side-channel attacks at Crypto 1996.

We are, of course, indebted to Brian LaMacchia, the General Chair, as well as the local organizing committee who together proved ideal liaisons for establishing the layout of the program and for supporting the speakers. Our job as program co-chairs was made much easier by the excellent tools developed by Shai Halevi; both Shai and Brian were always available at short notice to answer our queries. Finally, we would like to thank all the authors who submitted their work to Crypto 2016. Without you the conference would not exist.