Preface to IACR EUROCRYPT: Advances in Cryptology (EUROCRYPT) 2014

These are the proceedings of Eurocrypt 2014, the 33rd annual IACR Eurocrypt conference on the theory and applications of cryptographic techniques. The conference was held May 11-15, 2014, in Copenhagen, Denmark, and sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). Responsible for the local organisation were Lars Knudsen, from the Technical University of Denmark, and Gregor Leander, from the Ruhr University Bochum. We are indebted to them for their support.

The Eurocrypt 2014 Program Committee (PC) consisted of 32 members. Each paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers. Submissions co-authored by PC members were reviewed by at least five reviewers. All reviews were conducted double-blind and we excluded PC members from discussing submissions for which they had a possible conflict of interest.

We received a total of 197 submissions, many were of high-quality. From these, after in-depth discussions among the PC, we eventually selected 40 papers, four of which the PC recommended merging. Hence, in total 38 papers were presented during the conference and the revised versions of these papers are included in these proceedings. Because revisions were not reviewed again, the authors (and not the committee) bear full responsibility for the contents of their papers.

The review process would have been impossible without the hard work of PC members and 227 external reviewers, whose effort we would like to commend here. It has been an honour to work with everyone. The process was enabled by the Web Submission and Review Software 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 PC decided to honour two submissions with the Best Paper Award this year. These were "Unifying leakage models: from probing attacks to noisy leakage", authored by Alexandre Duc, Stefan Dziembowski, and Sebastian Faust, and "A heuristic quasi-polynomial algorithm for discrete logarithm in finite fields of small characteristic" authored by Razvan Barbulescu, Pierrick Gaudry, Antoine Joux, and Emmanuel Thomé.

In addition to the contributed talks, there were two invited talks given by Jeff Hoffstein and Adi Shamir. Jeff Hoffstein talked about `A mathematical history of NTRU and some related cryptosystems'. Adi Shamir talked about "The Security and Privacy of Bitcoin Transactions". We would like to thank them both for accepting our invitation and for their contribution to the program of Eurocrypt 2014.

Last, we dedicated the conference to James L. Massey (Former president of IACR and IACR Fellow 2009, 1934--2013), who lived nearby the conference venue when he passed away, and whose many contributions including cipher design and analysis were inspiring to many of us. We remembered Scott Vanstone (IACR Fellow 2011, 1947--2014) whose contributions to the deployment of Elliptic Curve Cryptography, as well as sustained educational leadership in applied cryptology, shaped a whole new generation of cryptographers.