Preface to IACR Fast Software Encryption (FSE) 2012

These are the proceedings of FSE 2012, the 19th International Workshop on Fast Software Encryption. The workshop, organized in cooperation with the International Association for Cryptologic Research, was held March 19-21, 2012 in Washington DC. The General Chair was Bruce Schneier, from British Telecom, USA.

This year, a total of 89 papers were submitted to the workshop. Each submission was reviewed by at least three PC members, while submissions co-authored by PC members were reviewed by at least five PC members. After the reviews were submitted, the committee deliberated online in depth and we eventually selected 24~submissions for presentation. The authors of the accepted papers were then given more than one month to revise their manuscript and to take into account the comments from the reviewers. This revision process allowed some interactions between the authors and the PC, and I am grateful to the PC members who spent a lot of time in this and contributed to guaranteeing the high standards of these papers. At the workshop, the papers were made available to the audience in electronic form. Then, the authors prepared the final version which are included in these proceedings. Since these final versions were not checked again before publication, the authors bear the responsibility for the contents of their papers.

The PC selected three papers for invitation to the Journal of Cryptology : "Improved Rebound Attack on the Finalist Grøstl" by Jérémy Jean, María Naya-Plasencia and Thomas Peyrin, "Recursive Diffusion Layers for Block Ciphers and Hash Functions" by Mahdi Sajadieh, Mohammad Dakhilalian, Hamid Mala and Pouyan Sepehrdad and "New attacks on Keccak-224 and Keccak-256" by Itai Dinur, Orr Dunkelman and Adi Shamir.

In addition to the papers included in this volume, we were fortunate to have in the program two invited talks: one by Kaisa Nyberg on "Provable" security against differential and linear cryptanalysis" and the other by Mitsuru Matsui on "The history of linear cryptanalysis". An invited paper corresponding to Kaisa Nyberg's talk is included in the proceedings. The conference also featured a rump session with short informal presentations. Dan Bernstein and Tanja Lange served as the chairs of the rump session.

I wish to thank all the authors who submitted their work to the conference. I am very grateful to the PC members for their hard and generous work. In addition, I gratefully acknowledge the help of a number of colleagues who provided reviews for the program committee. I am also indebted to Andrei Voronkov for his very nice Easychair conference management system which helped me compile this volume.

Finally, I would like to say that being the Program Chair for FSE 2012 has been a great honor and an exciting task.