Preface to IACR Theory of Cryptography (TCC) 2013

These are the proceedings of TCC 2013, the 10th Theory of Cryptography conference, held at the University of Tokyo, Japan from March 3, 2013 to March 6, 2013. The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). The General Chairs were Masayuki Abe and Tatsuaki Okamoto.

The Program Committee selected 36 papers to be accepted out of 98 submissions. The program includes papers on a wide variety of topics, from secure computation to zero-knowledge PCPs, by authors from many different backgrounds: one paper, "On the Circular Security of Bit-Encryption" is solely authored by a Ph.D. student Ron D. Rothblum; another paper, "Characterizing the Cryptographic Properties of Reactive 2-Party Functionalities" is co-authored by R. Amzi Jeffs, who was a high-school student at the time the paper was written.

On behalf of the Program Committee, I thank the authors of all submissions for contributing excellent manuscripts. These contributions are of course the life blood of TCC, providing the most essential ingredient for the conference. The high quality of submissions made the Program Committee's job both rewarding and challenging. Conflicts of interest were taken seriously by the Program Committee. In particular, no PC member (including the PC chair) played any role in deciding the fate of submissions by authors that were current students, postdoctoral researchers, or colleagues in the same institution. The program also included three invited talks: by Craig Gentry, titled "Encrypted Messages from the Heights of Cryptomania"; by Tal Malkin, titled "Secure Computation for Big Data"; and by Benny Applebaum, titled "Cryptographic Hardness of Random Local Functions -- a Survey." The conference featured a rump session for informal short presentations and announcements, chaired by abhi shelat.

There are many individuals to whom I am grateful in connection with this conference. But I begin by thanking Dan Boneh and Shai Halevi, who went above and beyond the call of duty in providing assistance to the success of the conference, despite having no official role in the organization of TCC 2013

This year, to increase the quality of the reviewing process, I wanted to add an automated way for PC members to have ongoing anonymous interactive communication with authors throughout the review period: this would enable reviewers to obtain clarifications on any aspects of submissions in a timely manner -- at the time when they are most engaged with any particular paper. (This is in contrast to a single 'response phase', where often the author responses arrive too late to help with crucial PC discussions.) However, no currently available software package for conference management supports such a feature, and communication via the PC chair is too cumbersome to encourage such interactions. Dan Boneh volunteered to write a web-based software system for enabling such interactions, and was very responsive to my requests for additional features and changes. Shai Halevi generously agreed to incorporate Dan's system into his existing conference management software, and provided me with very helpful assistance for using his software throughout the review process. The Program Committee used this new system throughout the TCC review process, and it greatly helped in clarifying issues about submissions. Despite this being a new experimental process, the Program Committee used the new system to engage in interactions with over a quarter of submitted papers. This would not have been possible without the generous contributions of time and effort by Dan Boneh and Shai Halevi, and I am deeply grateful to them for their work.

The Program Committee, which consisted of 20 top researchers in our field, worked very hard and I thank them for their dedication and effort. Special thanks are in order to Allison Lewko, Thomas Holenstien, and Mohammad Mahmoody who agreed to serve as shepherds for certain accepted papers. I also thank all the external reviewers (listed in the following pages) for providing thoughtful reviews of submissions. For running the conference itself, I am very grateful to the General Chairs Masayuki Abe and Tatsuaki Okamoto, and all the members of the local organizing committee for their hard work: Takeshi Chikazawa, Masami Hagiya (Organizing Committee Chair), Noboru Kunihiro, Hirofumi Muratani, Ryo Nishimaki, Miyako Ohkubo, Yuji Suga, Koutarou Suzuki, Keisuke Tanaka, Shigenori Uchiyama, and Saho Uchida. I also wish to thank the two volunteers who managed the conference webpage: Shinichiro Matsuo and Hirokazu Hiruma. All of these individuals gave their time on a voluntary basis and their work was essential to the organization of the conference. Finally, I am indebted to Oded Goldreich, the chair of the TCC Steering Committee, and all the members of the TCC Steering Committee, Mihir Bellare, Ivan Dåmgard, Shafi Goldwasser, Shai Halevi, Russell Impagliazzo, Ueli Maurer, Silvio Micali, Moni Naor, and Tatsuaki Okamoto, for their advice and trust. I am also grateful to previous TCC chairs Tal Rabin, Shai Halevi, Ran Canetti, Yuval Ishai, and Ronald Cramer for their generous advice.

January 2013                              Amit Sahai
TCC 2013 Program Chair