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...

The 9th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Public-Key Cr- tography(PKC 2006) took place in New York City. PKC is the premier inter- tional conference dedicated to cryptology focusing on all aspects of public-key cryptography. The event is sponsored by the International Association of Cr- tologic Research (IACR), and this year it was also sponsored by the Columbia University Computer Science Department as well as a number of sponsors from industry, among them: EADS and Morgan Stanley, which were golden sponsors, as well as Gemplus, NTT DoCoMo, Google, Microsoft and RSA...

As a beginning graduate student, I recall being frustrated by a general lack of acces sible sources from which I could learn about (theoretical) cryptography. I remember wondering: why aren't there more books presenting the basics of cryptography at an introductory level? Jumping ahead almost a decade later, as a faculty member my graduate students now ask me: what is the best resource for learning about (various topics in) cryptography? This monograph is intended to serve as an answer to these 1 questions -- at least with regard to digital signature schemes. Given the above motivation, this...