Topics in cryptology

This volume continues the tradition established in 2001 of publishing the c- tributions presented at the Cryptographers’ Track (CT-RSA) of the yearly RSA Security Conference in Springer-Verlag’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. With 14 parallel tracks and many thousands of participants, the RSA - curity Conference is the largest e-security and cryptography conference. In this setting, the Cryptographers’ Track presents the latest scienti? c developments. The program committee considered 49 papers and selected 20 for presen- tion. One paper was withdrawn by the authors. The program also included two invited talks by Ron Rivest (“Micropayments Revisited” – joint work with Silvio Micali) and by Victor Shoup (“The Bumpy Road from Cryptographic Theory to Practice”). Each paper was reviewed by at least three program committee members; paperswrittenbyprogramcommitteemembersreceivedsixreviews. Theauthors of accepted papers made a substantial e? ort to take into account the comments intheversionsubmittedtotheseproceedings. Inalimitednumberofcases, these revisions were checked by members of the program committee. I would like to thank the 20 members of the program committee who helped to maintain the rigorous scienti? c standards to which the Cryptographers’ Track aims to adhere. They wrote thoughtful reviews and contributed to long disc- sions; more than 400 Kbyte of comments were accumulated. Many of them - tended the program committee meeting, while they could have been enjoying the sunny beaches of Santa Barbara.