Eurocrypt 2005 Preface

These are the Proceedings of the 24th Annual IACR EUROCRYPT Conference. The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR; see www.iacr.org ), this year in cooperation with the Computer Science Department of the University of Aarhus, Denmark. As General Chair, Ivan Damgård was responsible for Local Organization.

The EUROCRYPT 2005 Program Committee (PC) consisted of 30 internationally renowned experts. Their names and affiliations are listed further on in these proceedings. At the November 15, 2004 submission deadline the PC had received in total 190 submissions via the IACR Electronic Submission Server. The subsequent selection process was divided into two phases, as usual. In the review phase each submission was carefully scrutinized by at least three independent reviewers, and the review reports, often extensive, were committed to the IACR Web Review System. These were taken as the starting point for the PC-wide web-based discussion phase. During this phase, additional reports were provided as needed, and the PC eventually had some 700 reports at its disposal. In addition, the discussions generated more than 850 messages, all posted in the system. During the entire PC phase, which started in August 2003 with my earliest invitations to PC members and which continued until March 2005, more than 1000 email messages were communicated. Moreover, the PC received much appreciated assistance by a large body of external reviewers. Their names are also listed further on in these proceedings.

The selection process for EUROCRYPT 2005 was finalized by the end of January 2005 with a one-day PC Meeting held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This meeting was attended by most of the PC members. The PC ultimately selected 33 papers for publication in these proceedings and presentation at the conference. After notification of acceptance the authors were provided with the review comments and were granted one month to prepare the final versions, which were due by February 28, 2005. These final versions were not subjected to further scrutiny by the PC and their authors bear full responsibility.

It was a great pleasure to work with this PC, and I thank all members for contributing so much of their scientific expertise, advice, opinions, preferences and devotion, and for their very hard work in the relatively short time-frame that a PC has to operate in.

The EUROCRYPT 2005 " Best Paper Award " was shared by Xiaoyun Wang, Xuejia Lai, Dengguo Feng, Hui Chen and Xiuyuan Yu for their paper "Cryptanalysis of the Hash Functions MD4 and RIPEMD" and by Xiaoyun Wang and Hongbo Yu for their paper "How to Break MD5 and Other Hash Functions."

Besides the above mentioned 33 regular presentations, the EUROCRYPT 2005 scientific program featured two invited speakers : René Schoof (University of Rome, Italy), with a survey talk on algebraic geometry algorithms in cryptology, in particular on point counting algorithms for algebraic varieties over finite fields, and Joe Kilian (Yianilos Labs, Princeton, USA), with a talk on "Confusion, Quagmire and Irrelevancy: An Optimist's View of the Future of Cryptographic Research."

Many others have, in one way or another, contributed to the PC, these proceedings or the EUROCRYPT conference as such, thereby also serving the International Cryptology Community as a whole, directly or indirectly.

The EUROCRYPT conference continues to attract many very high quality submissions from all over the world; so many in fact that not all good papers could be selected. All authors who submitted their work for consideration by the PC are hereby acknowledged for their contributions.

CWI ^* in Amsterdam and the Mathematical Institute at Leiden University, my employers, are gratefully acknowledged for their support. EUROCRYPT 2004 PC Co-Chairs Christian Cachin and Jan Camenisch (IBM Research), as well as CRYPTO 2004 PC Chair Matt Franklin (UC Davis), gave useful advice on a number of occasions. Also many thanks to Springer Verlag for their collaboration. Peter Landrock (Cryptomathic) is kindly acknowledged for agreeing to organize and chair the EUROCRYPT 2005 Rump Session, a traditional, entertaining Tuesday evening session with brief research announcements and ``any other business.''

Hats off to John Tromp (Quantum Computing and Advanced Systems Research Group, CWI), who reallocated, from the summer of 2004 until February 2005, substantial amounts of his precious research time to expertly managing the technical infrastructure for electronic submissions and webreview. The software was run on the network of CWI's INS Department. I hereby acknowledge the support of INS head Martin Kersten and his system manager Matthijs Mourits. Also many thanks to Harry Buhrman and Paul Vitéanyi! Thomas Herlea from KU Leuven's IACR Submission Server and Webreview System Development Team offered prompt technical assistance to John whenever needed. Michael Smeding (Computer Support Team, CWI) provided adequate, quick service to me and my group.

Serge Fehr of my Cryptology and Information Security Research Group at CWI was in charge of "General Affairs." In particular, he assisted me during the very busy week following the submission deadline, organized the PC meeting in collaboration with Wilmy van Ojik (Conference Organization, CWI), helped the PC by logging the entire decision process during the meeting, and provided instrumental assistance when I edited this volume. Serge, thanks a lot!

Finally, I thank Ivan Damgård, EUROCRYPT 2005 General Chair, for our very pleasant collaboration during the organization of EUROCRYPT 2005, a memorable addition to our many joint scientific endeavors (and friendship!)

Amsterdam/Leiden, March 2005               Ronald Cramer