Preface to IACR EUROCRYPT: Advances in Cryptology (EUROCRYPT) 2013

The Eurocrypt 2013 program committee (PC) consisted of 33 members. There were 202 papers submitted to the conference, of which one was eventually withdrawn. Each paper was assigned to at least three PC members, while submissions co-authored by PC members were reviewed by at least five other PC members. Papers were refereed anonymously. There were indeed a large number of high-quality submissions and the review process was a challenge. The PC was helped by reports from more than 250 external reviewers, produced a total of more than 670 reviews in all. After the reviews were submitted, the committee discussed the reviews for many weeks, before making a final decision. All of our deliberations were aided by the Web Submission and Review Software that has been written by Shai Halevi and the server was hosted by IACR. We would like to thank Shai for setting up the service on the server and helping us whenever needed.

The committee eventually selected 41 submissions for presentation during the conference and these are the articles that are included in this volume. Two of the accepted papers came from merging two pairs of submitted papers.

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 Sanjam Garg, Craig Gentry and Shai Halevi for their paper "Candidate Multilinear Maps from Ideal Lattices and Applications". We were greatly honored that the conference program included the 2013 IACR Distinguished Lecture talk by Eli Biham, entitled "How to Make a Difference: 25 Years of Differential Cryptanalysis", as well as an invited lecture by the designers of Keccak (Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters and Gilles Van Assche). We would like to thank them all for accepting our invitation and for their contribution to the program of Eurocrypt 2013.

We wish to thank all the authors who submitted their papers. The hard task of reading, commenting, debating and eventially selecting the papers to be accepted for the conference fell on the PC members. We are very grateful to all the committee members and all external reviewers for their hard and conscientious work. It has been a great honor to chair the PC for Eurocrypt 2013.