EUROCRYPT 2003 PREFACE

These are the proceedings of EUROCRYPT 2003, the 22nd annual Eurocrypt conference. The conference was sponsored by the IACR, the International Association of Cryptologic Research , this year in cooperation with the Institute of Mathematics and Cryptology, Faculty of Cybernetics, Military University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland. The general chair, Jerzy Gawinecki, was responsible for the local organization, and the conference registration was handled by the IACR secretariat at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

A total of 37 papers were accepted for presentation at the conference, out of 156 papers submitted (of which one was withdrawn by the authors shortly after the submission deadline). These proceedings contain revised versions of the accepted papers. In addition two invited talks were given: the first was given by Kris Gaj and Arkadiusz Orlowski, entitled "Facts and Myths of Enigma: Breaking Stereotypes". The second invited talk was given by Jacques Stern entitled "Why Provable Security Matters?". The conference program also included a rump session, chaired by Stanisław Jarecki, which featured short informal talks on recent results.

The reviewing process was a challenging task, and many good submissions had to be rejected. Each paper was reviewed by at least three members of the program committee, and papers co-authored by a member of the program committee were reviewed by at least six (other) members. The reviews were then followed by deep discussions on the papers, which contributed a lot to the quality of the final selection. In most cases, extensive comments were sent to the authors. It was a pleasure for me to work with the program committee, whose members worked very hard over several months. I am also very grateful to the external referees which contributed with their special expertise to the selection process. Their work is highly appreciated.

The submission of papers was done using an electronic submission software written by Chanathip Namprempre for CRYPTO 2000 with modifications by Andre Adelsbach for EUROCRYPT 2001. All but two papers were submitted using this software, while the two others were submitted on paper and then scanned and entered into the software. During the review process, the program committee was mainly communicating using a review software written by Bart Preneel, Wim Moreau, and Joris Claessens for EUROCRYPT 2000. I would like to thank Orr Dunkelman and Julia Stolin for their help in installing, solving problems, and adding features to the software. I am also very grateful to Wim Moreau for his great help in solving some of the problems we had with the software. The final decisions were made during a committee meeting in Paris. I would like to thank Helena Handschuh and Gemplus for organizing and hosting the meeting. I would also like to acknowledge Elad Barkan and Pnina Cohen for their help whenever it was required.

On behalf of the general chair I would like to acknowledge the members of the local organization committee in Warsaw. For financial support of the conference we are very grateful to this year's sponsors.

It is my pleasure to thank the general chair, Prof. Jerzy Gawinecki, for all his work in organizing the conference, and for the pleasant collaboration and various advises. I know he spent a lot of effort during a period of over two years into organizing the conference.

Finally, but most importantly, I would like to thank all the authors from all over the world who submitted papers to the conference, and to all the participants at the conference.

February 2003             Eli Biham