Some years ago, businesses could choose whether to migrate to electronic commerce, however, today it seems they have no choice. Predictions indicate that companies that do not make the necessary changes will be overrun by competition and ultimately fail. Therefore, we see more and more companies undergoing tremendous transformationin order to adapt to the new business paradigm. At the same time new companies are being established. One thing these companies have in common is the increased dependency on security technology. The invention of electronic commerce has changed the role of - curity...

EUROCRYPT 2001, the 20th annual Eurocrypt conference, was sponsored by the IACR, the International Association for Cryptologic Research, see http: //www. iacr. org/, this year in cooperation with the Austrian Computer - ciety (OCG). The General Chair, Reinhard Posch, was responsible for local or- nization, and registration was handled by the IACR Secretariat at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In addition to the papers contained in these proceedings, we were pleased that the conference program also included a presentation by the 2001 IACR d- tinguished lecturer, Andrew Odlyzko, on...