Dissemination Level PU Public X PP Restricted to other programme participants (including the Commission Services) RE Restricted to a group specified by the consortium (including the Commission Services) CO Confidential, only for members of the consortium (including the Commission Services) ECRYPT ⇪⇪⌃ The work described in this report has in part been supported by the Commission of the European Communities through the IST program under contract IST-2002-507932. The information in this document is provided as is, and no warranty is given or implied that the information is fit for any particular purpose. The user thereof uses the information at its sole risk and liability. Cryptology is the science that studies mathematical techniques in order to provide secrecy, authenticity and related properties for digital information. Cryptology is a fundamental enabler for security, privacy and dependability in the Information Society. Watermarking allows embedding hidden information into the digital media, such that the watermark is imperceptible, robust and difficult to remove. Cryptology and watermarking techniques can be found at the core of computer and network security, of digital identification and digital signatures, digital rights management systems, content retrieval, tamper detection, etc. Cryptology has developed as a science in the 1970s and 1980s. The basic cryptographic techniques to secure open networks have been widely deployed in open networks and in the 1990s cryptology has evolved from controlled technology with very few users to a commodity for securing communications. The main challenges are to integrate cryptology in ever shrinking devices (from sensor nodes over RFID to nano-scale devices) and to develop and further deploy advanced cryptographic techniques for secure computations by reducing trust in centralized or individual nodes thereby enhancing dependability and robustness and offering increased privacy. If advanced cryptology is deployed correctly, it can not only protect communications between secure areas, but can also protect in a robust and fair way the rights of all entities with potentially mutually conflicting interests in open, deperimeterized, and dynamic environments. The protection of digital media and information requires in some cases operations that are aware of the semantics and specific properties of the data; there is a need for developing a solid basis for these technologies, that can in the be combined in an effective way with cryptographic techniques. Finally there is a substantial need for further work on the long term foundations of cryptology as a science and engineering discipline, since our society critically depends on …