International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Crypto 2012 was held August 19-23 on the beautiful campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Program Co-chairs were Rei Safavi-Naini and Ran Canetti, and the General Chair was Yiqun Lisa Yin.

A total of 225 papers were submitted, and 48 were accepted for publication, a record number for IACR flagship conferences. For the Best Paper Award, the PC overwhelmingly selected “Efficient Dissection of Composite Problems, with Applications to Cryptanalysis, Knapsacks and Combinatorial Search Problems” by Itai Dinur, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, and Adi Shamir.

There were two invited talks and one tutorial session at the conference. Professor Jonathan Zittrain from Harvard gave a talk entitled “The End of Crypto”. Dr. Ernie Brickell from Intel spoke about “Recent Advances and Existing Research Questions in Platform Security”. Professor Adam Smith from Penn State delivered a tutorial on “Pinning Down ‘Privacy’ in Statistical Databases”. Dan Bernstein and Tanja Lange co-chaired yet another entertaining Rump Session. Almost all of the talks were video recorded. These videos, along with author's slides and full versions of the papers, are available on the conference program webpage.

Generous donations were given by five industry sponsors Google, Microsoft Research, Qualcomm, RIM, and Voltage Security, as well as the Marconi Fund. In addition, the conference applied and received a special funding of $10,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF). With all the financial support, stipends were offered to over 40 students, both domestic and international.

The Chairs of Crypto 2012 were very grateful for the wonderful work of Sally Vito and the UCSB conference services staff.