Preface, IACR CRYPTO 2010

CRYPTO 2010, the 30th Annual International Cryptology Conference, was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) in cooperation with the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy and the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara. The conference was held in Santa Barbara, California, on August 15-19, 2010, in conjunction with CHES 2010 (Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems). Zulfikar Ramzan served as the General Chair.

The conference received 203 submissions. The quality of the submissions was very high, and the selection process was a challenging one. The Program Committee, aided by a 159 external reviewers, reviewed all these submissions and after an intensive review period the committee accepted 41 of these submissions. Three submissions were merged into a single paper and two papers were merged into a single talk, yielding a total of 39 papers in the proceedings and 38 presentations at the conference. The revised versions of the 39 papers appearing in the proceeding were not subject to editorial review and the authors bear full responsibility for their contents. The best-paper award was awarded to the paper "Toward Basing Fully Homomorphic Encryption on Worst-Case Hardness" by Craig Gentry.

The conference featured two invited presentations. This year we celebrated 25 years from the publication of the ground-breaking work of Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff "The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof-Systems". We had the privilege of having "GMR" give the first invited talk of the conference. The second invited talk was in a joint session with CHES. The topic was "Is Theoretical Cryptography Any Good in Practice?" and the talk was jointly given by Ivan Damgård and Markus Kuhn. The program also included a Rump session, chaired by Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange, featuring short informal talks on new and in-progress results.

I'm in debt to the many people who contributed to the success of the conference, and I apologize to those I have forgotten. First and foremost I thank the authors who submitted their papers; a conference is only as good as the submissions that it receives. The Program Committee members made a great effort contributing their time, knowledge, expertise and taste and for that I am grateful. I also thank the large number of external reviewers who assisted in the process. (The program committee and sub-reviewers are listed in the following pages.) The submission and review process used the software that Shai Halevi designed and I received a lot of help from him in running it.

And always, I want to thank my friends at IBM Research Rosario Gennaro, Craig Gentry, Shai Halevi, Charanjit Jutla, Hugo Krawczyk and Vinod Vaikuntanathan -- being part of this group makes everything so much more worthwhile.