IACR Eurocrypt 2008, Preface

These are the proceedings of Eurocrypt 2008, the 27th Annual IACR Eurocrypt Conference. The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research ( http://www.iacr.org ), this year in cooperation with Tubitak ( http://www.tubitak.gov.tr ).

The Eurocrypt 2008 Program Committee (PC) consisted of 28 members whose names are listed on the next page. There were 163 papers submitted to the conference and the PC chose 31 of them. Each paper was assigned to at least three PC members, who either handled it themselves or assigned it to an external referee. After the reviews were submitted, the committee deliberated both online for several weeks and finally in a face-to-face meeting held in Bristol. Papers were refereed anonymously, with PC papers having a minimum of five reviewers. All of our deliberations were aided by the Web Submission and Review Software written and maintained by Shai Halevi. In addition to notification of the decision of the committee, authors received reviews; the default for any report given to the committee was that it should be available to the authors as well.

The committee decided to give the Best Paper Award to Ben Smith for his paper Isogenies and the Discrete Logarithm Problem in Jacobians of Genus 3 Hyperelliptic Curves . The conference program also included two invited lectures: one by Andy Clark entitled From Gamekeeping to Poaching - Information Forensics and Associated Challenges , and the other by Clifford Cocks on The growth and development of Public Key Cryptography .

I wish to thank all the people who made the conference possible. First and foremost the authors who submitted their papers. The hard task of reading, commenting, debating and finally selecting the papers for the conference fell on the PC members. Without the hard work of the committee members and their respective sub-reviewers the whole process would be so much harder to organise. I thank Shai Halevi for handling the submissions and reviews server, and for also organising the phone conference for those people unable to attend the Bristol PC meeting in person. I am also grateful to members of the IACR board, and previous PC Chairs, who shared their invaluable advice with me and to A. Murat Apohan and the rest of the local organising committee.

Finally, I would like to say that it has been a great honour be PC Chair for Eurocrypt 2008 and I only hope the readers of the following papers obtain as much enjoyment as I did in selecting them.