Preface, IACR ASIACRYPT 2010

ASIACRYPT 2010 was held in the Swissôtel Merchant Court in Singapore, during December 5 - 9, 2010. The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) in cooperation with the Coding and Cryptography Research Group of Nanyang Technological University. It was also supported by the Singapore Tourism Board, and co-sponsored by the National Research Foundation of Singapore, Lee Foundation, IBM Singapore Ltd., O'Connor's Singapore Ltd., Puffersoft Ltd., Privylink Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Singapore Ltd., Jardine OneSolution Ltd., and Singapore Mathematical Society.

San Ling chaired the conference and I served as the Program Chair.

There were 216 valid submissions. The Program Committee aided by 221 external reviewers spent 83 days on reviews and discussions. They spared no effort to increase the quality of their reviews. Every paper received at least three independent reviews, and papers from the committee members received five reviews. In total, there were more than 730 reviews followed by intensive discussion. This long and tough process, wrapped up with an intensive face-to-face meeting by the committee members convened at UC Santa Barbara, yielded 35 accepted papers. I regret not being able to select more of such high-quality papers due to space limitations. The proceedings include the revised versions of the accepted papers. The authors are fully responsible for their contents.

The best paper award was given to "Rotational Rebound Attacks on Reduced Skein" by Dmitry Khovratovich, Ivica Nikolic, and Christian Rechberger. There were a further two best papers, "Improved Single-Key Attacks on 8-Round AES-192 and AES-256" by Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, and Adi Shamir, and "Efficient Public-Key Cryptography in the Presence of Key Leakage" by Yevgeniy Dodis, Kristiyan Haralambiev, Adriana López-Alt, and Daniel Wichs, that were solicited for full version submission to the {\it Journal of Cryptology}. The conference program included two invited talks: "Cryptography, from Theory to Practice: A Personal Perspective" by Hugo Krawczyk, and "Cryptographic Hash Functions and the SHA-3 Competition" by Bart Preneel.

There are many people I would like to acknowledge but only a few can be listed here. First I would like to thank all the authors of the submitted papers. I am deeply grateful to all the members of the Program Committee for their expertise and enthusiasm that brought success to a difficult project. I also want to express appreciation to the external reviewers listed in the following pages. Special thanks to Shai Halevi for providing and setting up the splendid review software, and Huaxiong Wang and his staff at Nanyang Technological University who helped me to manage the review process in many ways. Finally, I am indebted to Kaoru Kurosawa, Mitsuru Matsui, Nigel Smart, and Tatsuaki Okamoto, who gave me invaluable advice as Chairs of past IACR conferences.

September 2010                            Masayuki Abe