Lecture Notes in Computer Science

ASIACRYPT 2003 was held in Taipei, Taiwan, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 4, 2003. The 9th Annual ASIACRYPT conference was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), this year in cooperation with the ChineseCryptologyandInformationSecurityAssociation(CCISA)andNational Cheng Kung University (NCKU) in Taiwan. One hundred and eighty-eight papers from 26 countries were submitted to ASIACRYPT 2003 and 33 (of which one paper was withdrawn by the authors afternoti?cation)ofthesewereselectedforpresentation.Theseproceedingsc- tainrevisedversionsoftheacceptedpapers.WehadanIACR2003Distinguished Lecture, by Dr. Don Coppersmith, entitled "Solving Low Degree Polynomials." In addition, two invited talks were given at the conference. One was given by Dr. Adi Shamir. The other one was given by Dr. Hong-Sen Yan, entitled "The Secret and Beauty of Ancient Chinese Locks." The conference program also included a rump session, chaired by Tzong Chen Wu, which featured short informal talks on recent results. It was a pleasure for me to work with the program committee, which was composed of 27 members from 17 countries; I thank them for working very hard overseveralmonths.Asamatteroffact,thereviewprocesswasachallengingand time-consuming task, and it lasted about 8 weeks, followed by more than half a month for discussions among the program committee members. All submissions were anonymously reviewed by at least 3 members in the relevant areas of the program committee; in some cases, particularly for those papers submitted by a member of the program committee, they were reviewed by at least six members. We are grateful to all the program committee members who put in a lot of e?ort andprecioustimegivingtheirexpertanalysisandcommentsonthesubmissions.