Preface, IACR Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography 2010

The 13th International Conference on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography (PKC 2010) was held May 26--28, 2010, at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris, France. PKC 2010 was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), in cooperation with the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA). The General Chairs of the conference were Michel Abdalla and Pierre-Alain Fouque.

The conference received a record number of 145 submissions and each submission was assigned to at least 3 committee members. Submissions co-authored by members of the Program Committee were assigned to at least 5 committee members. Due to the large number of high-quality submissions, the review process was challenging and we are deeply grateful to the 34 committee members and the 163 external reviewers for their outstanding work. After extensive discussions, the Program Committee selected 29 submissions for presentation during the conference and these are the articles that are included in this volume. The best paper was awarded to Petros Mol and Scott Yilek for their paper "Chosen-Ciphertext Security from Slightly Lossy Trapdoor Functions". The review process was run using the iChair software, written by Thomas Baignères and Matthieu Finiasz from EPFL, LASEC, Switzerland and we are indebted to them for letting us use their software.

The program also included two invited talks: it was a great honor to have Daniele Micciancio and Jacques Stern as invited speakers. Their talks were entitled, respectively, "Duality in Lattice Based Cryptography" and "Mathematics, Cryptography, Security". We would like to genuinely thank them for accepting our invitation and for contributing to the success of PKC 2010.

Finally, we would like to thank our sponsors Google, Ingenico, and Technicolor for their financial support and all the people involved in the organization of this conference. In particular, we would like to thank the Office for Courses and Colloquiums ( Bureau des Cours-Colloques ) from INRIA and Gaëlle Dorkeld, as well as Jacques Beigbeder and Joëlle Isnard from ENS, for their diligent work and for making this conference possible. We also wish to thank Springer for publishing the proceedings in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.