Preface, Eurocrypt 2006

The 2006 issue of the Eurocrypt conference was held in St Petersburg, Russia on May 28 -- June 1, 2006. It was the 25th Eurocrypt conference. Eurocrypt is sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). Eurocrypt 2006 was chaired by Anatoly Lebedev. I had the privilege to chair the program committee.

Eurocrypt collected 198 submissions on November 21, 2005. The program committee carried out a thorough review process. In total, 863 review reports were written by renowned experts, program committee members as well as external referees. Online discussions led to 1114 additional discussion messages and about 1000 emails. The review process was run using email and the iChair software by Thomas Baignères and Matthieu Finiasz. Every submitted paper received at least 3 review reports. The program committee had a meeting in Lausanne on February 4, 2006. We selected 33 papers, notified acceptance or rejection to the authors, and had a cheese fondue. Authors were then invited to revise their submission. The present proceedings include all the revised papers. Due to time constraints the revised versions could not be reviewed again.

We delivered a Eurocrypt Best Paper Award . The purpose of the award is to formally acknowledge authors of outstanding papers and to recognize excellence in the cryptographic research fields. Committee members were invited to nominate papers for this award. A poll then yielded a clear majority. This year, we were pleased to deliver the Eurocrypt Best Paper Award to Phong Q. Nguyen and Oded Regev for their brilliant paper "Learning a Parallelepiped: Cryptanalysis of GGH and NTRU Signatures".

The program committee invited two speakers: David Naccache and Kevin McCurley. The current proceedings include papers about their presentation.

I would like to thank Anatoly Lebedev for organizing the conference. I would like to thank the IACR Board for honoring me to chair the program committee. The program committee and external reviewers worked extremely hard. I deeply thank them for this volunteer work. Acknowledgments also go to the authors of submitted papers, the speakers, and the invited speakers. I am grateful to Thomas Baignères and Matthieu Finiasz for their hard work developing the iChair software and constantly adding features. I also thank Shai Halevi and Amr Youssef who participated in the software testing. Finally, I heartily thank Christine and Emilien, my family, for letting me spend some time on Eurocrypt.

This year, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Diffie-Hellman seminal paper "New Directions in Cryptography". As cryptography was becoming a new academic research area, this pioneer paper invented public-key cryptography. My wish is that research in cryptography will lead us to 30 more years of fun.