Preface, IACR PKC 2008

These are the Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography -- PKC 2008. The workshop was held in Barcelona, Spain on March 9-12, 2008.

It was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research IACR , this year in cooperation with MAK, the Research Group on Mathematics Applied to Cryptography at UPC, the Polytechnical University of Catalunya. The General Chair, Carles Padró, was responsible for chairing the local organization committee, for handling publicity and for attracting funding from sponsors.

The PKC 2008 Program Committee (PC) consisted of 30 internationally renowned experts. Their names and affiliations are listed further on in these proceedings. At the September 7, 2007 submission deadline the PC had received in total 71 submissions via the IACR Electronic Submission Server. The subsequent selection process was divided into two phases, as usual. In the review phase each submission was carefully scrutinized by at least three independent reviewers, and the review reports, often extensive, were committed to the IACR Web Review System. These were taken as the starting point for the PC-wide web-based discussion phase. During this phase, additional reports were provided as needed, and the PC eventually had some 258 reports at its disposal. In addition, the discussions generated more than 650 messages, all posted in the system. During the entire PC phase, which started on April 12, 2006 with the invitation by the PKC Steering Committee, and which continued until March 2008, more than 500 email messages were communicated. Moreover, the PC received much appreciated assistance by a large body of external reviewers. Their names are also listed further on in these proceedings.

The selection process for PKC 2008 was finalized by the end of November 2007. After notification of acceptance the authors were provided with the review comments and were granted three weeks to prepare the final versions, which were due by December 14, 2007. These final versions were not subjected to further scrutiny by the PC and their authors bear full responsibility. This Program Committee has worked hard to select a balanced, solid and interesting scientific program, and I thank them very much for their efforts.

After consultation with the Program Committee, I decided to grant the PKC 2008 " Best Paper Award " to Vadim Lyubashevsky (University of California at San Diego), for his paper Lattice-Based Identification Schemes Secure Under Active Attacks . Besides the above mentioned 21 regular presentations, the PKC 2008 scientific program featured three invited speakers : David Naccache (ENS, Paris) on Cryptographic Test Correction , Jean-Jacques Quisquater (Université Catholique de Louvain) on How to Secretly Extract Hidden Secret Keys: A State of the Attacks , and Victor Shoup (New York University) on The Role of Discrete Logarithms in Designing Secure Crypto-Systems . David Naccache also contributed (unrefereed) notes for his lecture, which are included in this volume as well.

CWI ^* in Amsterdam and the Mathematical Institute at Leiden University, my employers, are gratefully acknowledged for their support. Also many thanks to Springer Verlag for their collaboration. Thanks to Shai Halevi for his IACR web-handling system.

Eike Kiltz from CWI-group, besides serving as a Member of the Program Committee, provided lots of general assistance to the Chair, particularly when setting up and running the web-system and when preparing this volume. I thank Carles Padró, PKC 2008 General Chair, for our smooth and very pleasant collaboration. Finally, we thank our sponsors the Spanish Ministery of Education and Science, NXP, and UPC.

Amsterdam/Leiden, January 2008                                        Ronald Cramer