Advances in cryptology

Crypto 2002, the 22nd Annual Crypto Conference, was sponsored by IACR, the International Association for Cryptologic Research, in cooperation with the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy and the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara. It is published as Vol. 2442 of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) of Springer Verlag. Note that 2002, 22 and 2442 are all palindromes... (Don’t nod!) Theconferencereceived175submissions, ofwhich40wereaccepted; twos- missionsweremergedintoasinglepaper, yieldingthetotalof39papersaccepted for presentation in the technical program of the conference. In this proceedings volume you will ? nd the revised versions of the 39 papers that were presented at the conference. The submissions represent the current state of work in the cryptographic community worldwide, covering all areas of cryptologic research. In fact, many high-quality works (that surely will be published elsewhere) could not be accepted. This is due to the competitive nature of the conference and the challenging task of selecting a program. I wish to thank the authors of all submitted papers. Indeed, it is the authors of all papers who have made this conference possible, regardless of whether or not their papers were accepted. The conference program was also immensely bene? ted by two plenary talks.