Advances in Cryptology - ASIACRYPT 2008

The 14th International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cr- tology and Information Security-ASIACRYPT 2008-was held in Melbourne during December 7-11,2008.Theconferencewassponsoredbythe International Associationfor CryptologicResearch(IACR) in cooperationwith the Center for AdvancedComputing -CryptographyandAlgorithms(ACAC),MacquarieU- versity,Deakin University,the ResearchNetwork for a Secure Australia (RNSA) andSECIA.ASIACRYPT2008waschairedbyLynnBattenandIhadthehonor of serving as the Program Chair. There were 208 submissions from which 12 papers were withdrawn. Each paper got assigned to at least three referees. Papers submitted by the members of the Program Committee got assigned to ?ve referees. In the ?rst stage of the review process, the submitted papers were read and evaluated by the Program Committee members and then in the second stage, the papers were scrutinized during an extensive discussion.Finally, the ProgramCommittee chose 33 papers to be included in the conference program. The authors of the accepted papers hadthreeweeksforrevisionandpreparationof?nalversions.Therevisedpapers were not subject to editorial review and the authors bear full responsibility for their contents. The Program Committee selected three best papers. They were: "Speeding up Pollard Rho Method on Prime Fields" by Jung Hee Cheon, Jin Hong, and Minkyu Kim, "A Modular Security Analysis of the TLS Handshake Protocol" by Paul Morrissey, Nigel P. Smart and Bogdan Warinschi and "Breaking the F-FCSR-HStreamCipherinRealTime"byMartinHellandThomasJohansson. The authors of the three papers were invited to submit the full versions of their papers to the Journal of Cryptology. The authors of the ?rst paper, Jung Hee Cheon, Jin Hong and Minkyu Kim, were recipients of the Best Paper Award.