Preface, Fast Software Encryption (FSE) 2006

Fast Software Encryption (FSE) 2006 is the thirteenth in a series of workshops on symmetric cryptography. It has been sponsored for the last five years by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) and previous FSE workshops have been held around the world:

The FSE workshop is devoted to research on fast and secure primitives for symmetric cryptography, including the design and analysis of block ciphers, stream ciphers, encryption schemes, analysis and evaluation tools, hash functions, and message authentication codes.

This year more than one hundred papers were submitted to FSE for the first time. After an extensive review by the program committee, 27 papers were presented at the workshop. Of course, the program would not have been complete without the invited speaker, and the presentation by Eli Biham on the early history of differential cryptanalysis was particularly appreciated by workshop attendees.

We are very grateful to the program committee and to all the external reviewers for their hard work. Each paper was refereed by at least three reviewers, with papers from program committee members receiving at least five reviews. The local organizing committee at Graz worked very hard and we particularly thank Melanie Blauensteiner, Christophe De Canniére, Sharif Ibrahim, Florian Mendel, Norbert Pramstaller, Christian Rechberger, and Michaela Tretter-Dragovic for their generous efforts and strong support. In Paris we are indebted to Henri Gilbert and Helena Handschuh who shared their valuable experience from FSE 2005 and to Côme Berbain and Olivier Billet for proof-reading and preparing the FSE pre-proceedings.

To close we thank the IACR secretariat, Kevin McCurley, and Shai Halevi for their help with the registration process and we thank the IACR for their support of FSE. We are grateful to K.U. Leuven for their web-based review software and we thank both France Telecom and Siemens, Munich for their financial support of FSE 2006.