Preface, IACR FSE 2007

Fast Software Encryption 2007 is the 14th annual workshop for the sixth time sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). FSE has become a brand which attracts top research papers on symmetric cryptology. This includes papers on fast and secure primitives for symmetric cryptography, such as the design and analysis of block ciphers, stream ciphers, encryption schemes, hash functions, and message authentication codes (MACs), and on tools for analysis and evaluation. Previous editions of FSE took place in Cambridge, Leuven, Haifa, New York, Yokohama, Lund, Delhi, Paris, Graz.

The Fast Software Encryption 2007 workshop was held March 26-28, 2007 in Luxembourg. It was organized by the General Chair Prof. Jean-Claude Asselborn (University of Luxembourg) in cooperation with the research lab LACS (Laboratory of Algorithms, Cryptography and Security) of the Computer Science and Communications research unit of the University of Luxembourg. The conference was attended by 160 registered participants from 36 different countries.

There were 104 papers submitted to FSE'2007 from which 28 were selected for presentation. The selection of papers was a challenging task, each submission had at least four reviewers, papers from the program committee members having at least five. A total of about 450 reviews were written by the committee and the external reviewers. The discussion phase was very fruitful, leading to more than 400 discussion comments in total, with several discussions going beyond 20 comments. I would like to thank the program committee and the external reviewers, who did an excellent job. It was a real pleasure to work with this team.

We would also like to thank the following people: Thomas Baignères and Matthieu Finiasz as the authors of the iChair review software, Dmitry Khovratovich for his help with the conference web-site and compilation of the proceedings, Volker Müller, Michel Carpentier, Christian Hutter and SIU for videotaping the talks and providing a wireless LAN for the participants. We would like to thank the students of the Lycée technique ``Ecole de Commerce et de Gestion" and our secretaries Elisa Ferreira, Ragga Eyjolfsdottir and Mireille Kies for their help in the organization of the workshop. We would also like to thank IACR and in particular Helena Handschuh, Shai Halevi and Bart Preneel for constant support. Thanks to Britta Schlüter for the public relations work.

Finally we are grateful to our sponsors FNR --- Luxembourg National Research Fund and the University of Luxembourg, as well as Centre de Culture et de Rencontre Neumünster, Ministry of Culture, Research and Universities.