Preface to IACR Fast Software Encryption (FSE) 2011

You are holding the proceedings of FSE 2011, the 18th International Workshop on Fast Software Encryption. This workshop was organized in cooperation with the International Association for Cryptologic Research. It was held in Lyngby, Denmark, from February 13th to February 16th, 2011.

The FSE 2011 Program Committee (PC) consisted of 21 members, listed on the next page. There were 106 submissions and 22 were selected to appear in this volume. Each submission was assigned to at least three PC members and reviewed anonymously. During the review process, the PC members were assisted by 66 external reviewers. Once the reviews were available, the committee discussed the papers in depth using the EasyChair conference management system. At the workshop, papers were made available to the audience as a preproceeding in electronic form. After the conference, the authors of accepted papers were given six weeks to prepare the final versions included in these proceedings. The revised papers were not reviewed again and their authors bear the responsibility for their content.

In addition to the papers included in this volume, the conference also featured a Rump session. Vincent Rijmen served as the chair of the Rump session. The conference also had the pleasure of hearing invited talks by Willy Meier and Ivan Damgård. An invited paper corresponding to Willy Meier's talk is included in the proceedings. Ivan Damgård considered that the material presented in his talk was already published and thus did not wish to send an invited paper.

The program committee decided to give the Best Paper Award to Takanori Isobe for his paper titled "A Single-Key Attack on the Full GOST Block Cipher." In addition, the committee selected another paper for invitation to the Journal of Cryptology : "Cryptanalysis of PRESENT-like ciphers with secret S-boxes" by Julia Borghoff, Lars Ramkilde Knudsen, Gregor Leander and Søren Thomsen.

I wish to thank all the people who contributed to this conference. First, all the authors who submitted their work. The PC members and their external reviewers for the thorough job they did while reading and commenting the submissions. Without them, selecting the papers for this conference would have been an impossible task. I thank Andrei Voronkov for his review system EasyChair. Once again, I was very glad to have access to his magic tools that helped me for assembling this volume. I also would like to thank the General Chairs, Lars Knudsen and Gregor Leander for making this conference possible.

Being the program chair for FSE 2011 was a great honor and I may only hope that the readers of these proceedings will find them as interesting as I found the task of selecting their content.

April 2011                                                              Antoine Joux