Preface, IACR ASIACRYPT 2012

ASIACRYPT 2012, the 18th International Conference on Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, was held during December 2-6 in Beijing International Convention Center, Beijing, China. The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) in cooperation with the Chinese Association for Cryptologic Research (CACR). It was also co-sponsored by National Natural Science Foundation of China, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and Intel Corporation.

Among 241 valid submissions we received, at last 43 were accepted for publication after a very tough evaluation process. The Program Committee (PC) with help of 256 external reviewers provided at least three independent reviews for each paper, and five or more for those with PC contributions.

There were also two invited talks. On Monday, Dan Boneh delivered Pairing-based Cryptography: Past, Present, and Future as IACR Distinguished Lecture. On Wednesday, Chuanming Zong spoke on "Some Mathematical Mysteries in Lattices". In addition to the invited talks, the conference also held a Rump session, full of academic opinions and enjoyment.

Looking back at the time, we selected a particularly large and broad Program Committee and encouraged PC members to focus on the positive aspects of submissions. During the one and a half months long independent review phase, each PC member had about 28 submissions to review, our PC members and the external reviewers worked very hard and efficient. In the following one month long discussion phase, PC members communicate each other's opinion on the board every day and night. We processed the anonymized questions from PC members to authors, and resulted in a better quality of review after eschange of messages for several times.

We would like to thank the authors of all 241 submissions. Their contributions made this conference possible. We are extremely grateful to the PC members for their enormous investment of time and efforts in the difficult and delicate process of review and selection, especially given the last decision days were in the midst of summer vacation time. A list of PC members and external reviewers can be found on succeeding pages of this volume. We would like to thank Xuejia Lai, who was the General Chair in charge of the local organization and finances. Special thanks go to Shai Halevi for providing the helpful review software and to Yue Sun, who provided technical support for the entire ASIACRYPT 2012 process. We are also grateful to Bart Preneel, the IACR President, for his guidance on IACR rules and Dong Hoon Lee, the ASIACRYPT 2011 Program Co-Chair, for his timely information during the process via mails.

September 2012                              Xiaoyun Wang and Kazue Sako