Preface, PKC 2004

PKC 2004 was the Seventh International Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography and was sponsored by IACR, the International Association for Cryptology Research (www.iacr.org). This year the workshop was organized in cooperation with the Institute for Infocomm Research (I$^2$R), Singapore.

There were 106 paper submissions from 19 countries to PKC 2004. That is the highest submission number in the PKC history. Due to the large number of submissions and the high quality of the submitted papers, not all the papers that contained new ideas were accepted. Of the 106 submissions, 32 were selected for the proceedings. Each paper was sent to at least 3 members of the Program Committee for comments. The revised versions of the accepted papers were not checked for correctness of their scientific aspects and the authors bear the full responsibility for the contents of their papers. Some authors will write final versions of their papers for publication in refereed journals.

I am very grateful to the members of the Program Committee for their hard work in the difficult task of selecting less than 1 out of 3 of the submitted papers as well as the following external referees who helped the Program Committee: Nuttapong Attrapadung, Roberto Maria Avanzi, Gildas Avoine, Joonsang Baek, Qingjun Cai, Jae Choon Cha, Chien-Ning Chen, Liqun Chen, Xiaofeng Chen, Koji Chida, Nicolas T. Courtois, Yang Cui, Jean-François Dhem, Louis Goubin, Louis Granboulan, Rob Granger, Jens Groth, Yumiko Hanaoka, Darrel Hankerson, Chao-Chih Hsu, Tetsutaro Kobayashi, Yuichi Komano, Hidenori Kuwakado, Tanja Lange, Peter Leadbitter, Byoungcheon Lee, Chun-Ko Lee, Henry C.J. Lee, John Malone Lee, Yong Li, Benoît Libert, Hsi-Chung Lin, Yi Lu, Jean Monnerat, Anderson C.A. Nascimento, C. Andrew Neff, Akira Otsuka, Daniel Page, Kenny Paterson, Kun Peng, David Pointcheval, Taiichi Saitoh, Junji Shikata, Igor Shparlinksi, Martijn Stam, Ron Steinfeld, Koutarou Suzuki, Shigenori Uchiyama, Frederik Vercauteren, Guilin Wang, Benne de Weger, Guohua Xiong, Go Yamamoto, Shoko Yonezawa, Rui Zhang, and Huafei Zhu. (I apologize for any possible omission.) The Program Committee appreciates their effort.

Thanks to Patricia Loh for the secretarial work and to Ying Qiu for maintaining the WWW page of the conference. Finally, I would like to thank everyone who submitted to PKC 2004, and IACR for its sponsorship.

December 2003                       Feng Bao