Preface to IACR EUROCRYPT: Advances in Cryptology (EUROCRYPT) 2017

Eurocrypt 2017, the 36th annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, was held in Paris, France, during April 30th - May 4th, 2017. The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). Michel Abdalla (ENS, France) was responsible for the local organization. He was supported by a local organizing team consisting of David Pointcheval (ENS, France), Emmanuel Prouff (Morpho, France), Fabrice Benhamouda (ENS, France), Pierre-Alain Dupoint (ENS, France) and Tancrède Lepoint (SRI International). We are indebted to them for their support and smooth collaboration.

The conference program followed the now established parallel track system where the works of the authors were presented in two concurrently running tracks. Only the invited talks spanned over both tracks.

We received a total of 264 submissions. Each submission was anonymized for the reviewing process and was assigned to at least three of the 56 Program Committee members. Submissions co-authored by committee members were assigned to at least four members. Committee members were allowed to submit at most one paper, or two if both were co-authored. The reviewing process included a first-round notification followed by a rebuttal for papers which made it to the second round. After extensive deliberations the program committee accepted 67 papers. The revised versions of these papers are included in these three volume proceedings, organized topically within their respective track.

The committee decided to give the Best Paper Award to the paper "Scrypt is Maximally Memory-Hard" by Joël Alwen, Binyi Chen, Krzysztof Pietrzak, Leonid Reyzin and Stefano Tessaro. The two runners-up to the award, "Computation of a 768-bit Prime Field Discrete Logarithm", by Thorsten Kleinjung, Claus Diem, Arjen K. Lenstra, Christine Priplata and Colin Stahlke, and "Short Stickelberger Class Relations and Application to Ideal-SVP", by Ronald Cramer, Léo Ducas and Benjamin Wesolowski, received honorable mentions. All three papers received invitations for the Journal of Cryptology.

The program also included invited talks by Gilles Barthe, titled "Automated Proof for Cryptography", and Nigel Smart, titled "Living Between the Ideal and Real Worlds".

We would like to thank all the authors who submitted papers. We know that the program committee's decisions, especially rejections of very good papers which did not find a slot in the sparse number of accepted papers, can be very disappointing. We sincerely hope that your works eventually get the attention they deserve.

We are also indebted to the Program Committee members and all external reviewers for their voluntary work, especially since the newly established and unified page limits and the increasing number of submissions induce quite a workload. It has been an honor to work with everyone. The committee's work was tremendously simplified by Shai Halevi's submission software and his support, including running the service on IACR servers.

Finally, we thank everyone else - speakers, session chairs, and rump session chairs - for their contribution to the program of Eurocrypt 2017. We would also like to thank Thales, NXP, Huawei, Microsoft Research, Rambus, ANSSI, IBM, Orange, Safran, Oberthur Technologies, CryptoExperts and CEA Tech for their generous support.