Asiacrypt 2002, Preface

Asiacrypt 2002 was held in Queenstown, New Zealand, December 1-5, 2002. The conference was organized by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR).

The program committee received 173 submissions from around the world, from which 34 were selected for presentation. Each submission was reviewed by at least three experts in the relevant research area.

Let me first thank all the authors, including those whose submissions were not successful, for taking their time to prepare the submissions. Their dedication and efforts in advancing research in cryptography made this conference possible.

Selecting presentations from such a large number of submissions had been an extremely difficult and challenging task. The program committee members together with external referees spent thousands of hours of their precious time in reviewing the submissions. At the completion of the selection process, the program committee received 875 review reports in total. In addition, the committee received several hundreds of comments during the three week period of discussions.

Taking this opportunity, I would like to thank all the program committee members for their time and dedication. Without their expertise in the state of the art in cryptography and their willingness to serve the data security community, the conference would not have had such a high quality program. I would also like to thank the numerous external referees for their invaluable assistance in identifying the scientific and practical merits of the submissions.

The quality of the program was further enhanced by two distinguished keynote speeches delivered by Professor Tsutomu Matsumoto from Yokohama National University in Japan, and Dr Moti Yung from CertCo and Columbia University in the USA. On behalf of the program committee, I would like to thank both prominent pioneers in cryptography for their inspiring presentations.

Thanks also go to the general chair Hank Wolfe from the University of Otago for successfully running the conference in such a beautiful town. It had been a wonderful experience for me to work with Hank.

The reviewing process benefited greatly from Bart Preneel and Wim Moreau from their advice on handling the reviewing software. I appreciate Colin Boyd for his assistance in editing the proceedings. My special thanks go to Lawrence Teo who acted as my assistant during the entire period of setting up the website, accepting, reviewing submissions and editing the final proceedings. The year-long process would not have been run so smoothly without his tireless help as well as superb technical skills in handling the software packages.