Preface, Theory of Cryptograph Conference, 2006

TCC 2006 was the third Theory of Cryptography Conference, which was held at Columbia University in Manhattan, New York, March 4-7, 2006. TCC 2006 was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) and organized in cooperation with the Computer Science department of Columbia University. The local-arrangements chair was Tal Malkin.

The program committee, consisting of thirteen members, received 91 submissions and selected for publication 31 of these submissions. The quality of the submissions was very high, and the selection process was a challenging one. The proceedings consist of the revised versions of these 31 papers. Revisions were not checked as to their contents, and the authors bear full responsibility for the contents of their papers. In addition to the 31 accepted papers, the program included two tutorials: A tutorial on "Black-Box Separation Results" by Omer Reingold and a tutorial on "Non-Black-Box Techniques" by Boaz Barak. The conference featured a rump session for informal short presentations of new results, chaired by Charlie Rackoff and boosted by Tequilas!

We are in debt to the many people who contributed to the success of TCC 2006, and we apologize for those whom we have forgotten to mention. First and foremost we thank the authors who submitted their papers to TCC 2006, a conference is only as good as the submissions that it receives. The program committee members made a concentrated effort during the short review period contributing their time, knowledge, expertise and taste, and for that we are extremely grateful. We also thank the large number of external reviewers who assisted the committee in the review process.

A heartfelt thanks goes to our local arrangements chair Tal Malkin and her assistant Sophie Majewski for facilitating the communication with Columbia University. Their hard work made the local arrangements an effortless process for us. We also thank Angelos D. Keromytis, Michael Locasto, and Angelos Stavrou for giving us a web-server at Columbia University on which to host the TCC work and helping us manage it.

This is the first year that TCC is sponsored by the IACR. Several people at the IACR helped us navigate this new terrain, in particular Andy Clark, Helena Handschuh and Kevin McCurley. We also benefited from advice from members of the TCC Steering Committee, including Mihir Bellare, Ivan Damgård, Oded Goldreich and Moni Naor. Additional help came from the organizers of last year's TCC: Shafi Goldwasser, Joe Kilian and Joanne Talbot-Hanley, and the people at Springer, in particular Alfred Hofmann and Anna Kramer. And last but not least, thanks to our group members Ran Canetti, Rosario Gennaro, Hugo Krawczyk and Masa Abe for all their support (emotional and otherwise).