Preface to IACR Eurocrypt 2011

These are the proceedings of Eurocrypt 2011, the 30th in the series of European conferences on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques. The conference was organised under the auspices of the International Association for Cryptologic Research and was held in Tallinn, Estonia from May 15th to 19th, 2011.

The aim of this series of conferences is to bring together leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry in the field of cryptography. The conference program is intended to reflect the best of cryptographic research, in its widest sense. This year, a deliberate attempt was made to broaden the technical scope of the conference without making any compromise to its quality. The main mechanism for achieving this was to select program committee members from as broad a range of sub-areas of the field as possible, with the intention of sending a clear signal to potential authors from the field as a whole. I trust that readers of this volume find plenty to interest them here, and agree that the quality of the papers is as high as ever.

The program consisted of 2 invited talks and 31 contributed papers. The invited speakers were Ronald Cramer (CWI, Amsterdam and Mathematical Institute, Leiden) and Phong Nguyen (INRIA and ENS). I would like to thank them for accepting my invitation, for supplying informative abstracts for these proceedings, and for delivering excellent talks. It was a privilege to have such luminaries of our field as invited speakers.

The contributed papers were selected from 167 submissions. Each paper was reviewed by at least 3 people, with the submissions involving program committee members being subjected to at least 5 reviews each. There was significant online discussion about many of the papers, and a full-day program committee meeting was held at Royal Holloway on January 12th, 2011 to finalise the program. The program committee decided to make a best paper award this year, and the award went to Eike Kiltz, Krzysztof Pietrzak, David Cash, Abhishek Jain and Daniele Venturi for their paper "Efficient Authentication from Hard Learning Problems."

I would like to thank all the people who helped with the conference program and organisation, particularly the general chair, Helger Lipmaa. My heartfelt thanks go to the program committee and their sub-reviewers, as listed on the following pages, for their thoroughness during the review process. We had a tough assignment with many submissions and tight deadlines, and the committee members acted with utmost professionalism and attention to detail throughout. My particular thanks are due to Henri Gilbert, the previous program chair, who shared many insights with me, and to David Pointcheval, the next program chair, who kindly agree to join the committee at short notice and who acted as a very effective "sweeper".

The submission and review process was greatly simplified by the ichair software developed by Thomas Baignères and Matthieu Finiasz. My thanks to them for producing this software and helping me with some technical queries during the review process. I will be sending them some Estonian delicacies by way of thanks; I highly recommend their software to all future program chairs. Thanks are also due to Tristan Findley and Jon Hart at Royal Holloway for maintaining the submission server and for their IT support during the program committee meeting.

I am grateful to the authors of all submitted papers for supporting the conference. The authors of accepted papers are thanked again for revising their papers according to the suggestions of the reviewers and for returning latex source files in good time. The revised versions were not checked by the program committee so authors bear full responsibility for their contents. I thank the staff at Springer for their help with producing the proceedings.

EuroCrypt 2011 was supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Estonian Centre of Excellence in Computer Science, EXCS. I would also like to thank Guardtime, Qualcomm and Swedbank, the other sponsors of EuroCrypt 2011, for their generous support.

Finally, I would like to thank my partner Liz and my daughter Cara for their forbearance during a particularly hectic period.

February 2011                                                             Kenny Paterson
Program Chair
Eurocrypt 2011