Preface, IACR Eurocrypt 2012

These are the proceedings of Eurocrypt 2012, the 31st Annual IACR Eurocrypt Conference. The conference, sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research, was held April 15--19, 2012 in Cambridge, UK, within the celebrations of Alan Turing Year. The general chair was Nigel Smart, from University of Bristol.

The Eurocrypt 2012 program committee (PC) consisted of 32 members. There were 195 papers submitted to the conference. Each paper was assigned to at least three PC members, while submissions co-authored by PC members were reviewed by at least four PC members. Papers were refereed anonymously. Due to the large number of high-quality submissions, the review process was challenging: the PC, aided by reports from 177 external reviewers, produced a total of 604 reviews in all. After the reviews were submitted, the committee deliberated online for several weeks, exchanging 738 discussion messages. All of our deliberations were aided by the iChair web submission and review software written by Thomas Baignères and Matthieu Finiasz. We are indebted to them for letting us use their software and to provide us with some help.

The committee eventually selected 41 submissions for presentation during the conference and these are the articles that are included in this volume. Note that these proceedings contain the revised versions of the selected papers. Since the revisions were not checked again before publication, the authors (and not the committee) bear full responsibility of the contents of their papers.

The committee decided to give the Best Paper Award to Antoine Joux and Vanessa Vitse for their paper "Cover and Decomposition Index Calculus on Elliptic Curves made practical. Application to a previously unreachable curve over F _{p ⁶} ." The conference program also included two invited lectures, and short abstracts are provided in the proceedings: one by Antoine Joux entitled "A Tutorial on High Performance Computing applied to Cryptanalysis," and the other by Alfred Menezes on "Another Look at Provable Security." We would like to thank them for accepting our invitation and for contributing to the success of Eurocrypt 2012.

We wish to warmly thank 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. We are very grateful to the committee members and their sub-reviewers for their hard and conscientious work. Finally, we would like to thank Jacques Beigbeder for setting up and maintaining the submission and review server at ENS, and Nigel Smart for his great help.

Finally, we would like to say it has been a great honor to be PC Chairs for Eurocrypt 2012!

April 2012                               David Pointcheval
Thomas Johansson