Preface, CRYPTO 2005

These are the proceedings of Crypto 2005, the 25th Annual International Cryptology Conference. The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) in cooperation with the IEEE Computer Science Technical Committee on Security and Privacy and the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara. The conference was held in Santa Barbara, California, August 14-18, 2005.

The conference received 178 submissions, out of which the program committee selected 33 for presentation. The selection process was carried out by the program committee via an "on line" meeting. The authors of selected papers had a few weeks to prepare final versions of their papers, aided by comments from the reviewers. However, most of these revisions were not subject to any editorial review.

This year, a "Best Paper Award" was given to Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu, for their paper "Finding Collisions in the Full SHA-1."

The conference program included two invited lectures. Ralph Merkle delivered an IACR Distinguished Lecture, entitled "The Development of Public Key Cryptography: a Personal View; and Thoughts on Nanotechnology." Dan Boneh gave an invited talk, entitled "Bilinear Maps in Cryptography."

We continued the tradition of a "rump session," featuring short, informal presentations (usually serious, sometimes entertaining, and occasionally both). The rump session was chaired this year by Phong Q. Nguyê.

I would like to thank everyone who contributed to the success of this conference. First, thanks to all the authors who submitted papers: a conference program is no better than the quality of the submissions (and hopefully, no worse). Second, thanks to all the members of the program committee: it was truly an honor to work with a group of such talented and hard working individuals. Third, thanks to all the external reviewers (listed below) for assisting the program committee: their expertise was invaluable. Fourth, thanks to Matt Franklin, Dan Boneh, Jan Camenisch, and Christian Cachin for sharing with me their experiences as previous Crypto and Eurocrypt program chairs. Finally, thanks to my wife, Miriam, and my children, Alec and Nicol, for their love and support, and for putting up with all of this.