Public Key Cryptography - PKC 2009

It has been a real pleasure to have taken part in organizing the 12th Inter- tional Conference on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography (PKC 2009). PKC 2009 was held March 18-20, 2009, on the campus of the Univ- sity of California, Irvine (UCI). As usual, it was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) in cooperation with: - UCI Secure Computing and Networking Center (SCONCE) - UCI Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (DBSICS) - California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) The PKC 2008 Program Committee (PC) consisted of 33 internationally r- ognized researchers with combined expertise covering the entire scope of the conference. Recent growth in the number of cryptography venues has resulted in sti? competition for high-quality papers. Nonetheless, PKC's continued success is evident from both the number and the quality of submissions. PKC 2009 - ceived a total of 112 submissions. They were reviewed by the PC members and a highly quali?ed team of external reviewers. Each submission was refereed by at least three reviewers. After deliberations by the PC, 28 submissions were accepted for presentation. Based on extensive discussions, the PKC 2009 best paper awardwas givento Alexander Mayand MaikeRitzenhofen for their paper "Implicit Factoring: On Polynomial Time Factoring Given Only an Implicit Hint".Theconferenceprogramalsoincluded twoinvited talks,byAnna Lysy- skaya (Brown University) and Amit Sahai (UCLA).