Progress in Cryptology - AFRICACRYPT 2010, Third International Conference on Cryptology in Africa, Stellenbosch, South Africa, May 3-6, 2010. Proceedings

Africacrypt 2010, the Third International Conference on Cryptology in Africa, took place May 3–6, 2010 in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The General Chairs, Riaal Domingues from the South African Communications and Security Agency and Christine Swart from the University of Cape Town, were always a pleasure to work with and did an outstanding job with the local arrangements. We are deeply thankful that they agreed to host Africacrypt 2010 with only four months notice after unanticipated events forced a change of location. The Africacrypt 2010 submission deadline was split into two. Authors submitting papers were required to register titles and abstracts by the first deadline, January 5. A total of 121 submissions had been received by this deadline, although some were withdrawn before review. Authors were allowed to continue working on their papers until the second deadline, January 10. Submissions were evaluated in three phases over a period of nearly two months. The selection phase started on January 5: Program Committee members began evaluating abstracts and volunteering to handle various papers. We assigned a team of people to each paper. The review phase started on January 11: Program Committee members were given access to the full papers and began in-depth reviews of 82 submissions. Most of the reviews were completed by February 7, the beginning of the discussion phase. Program Committee members were given access to other reviews and built consensus in their evaluations of the submissions. In the end the discussions included 285 full reports and 203 additional comments. The submissions, reviews, and subsequent discussions were handled smoothly by iChair. On February 21 we sent out 2 notifications of conditional acceptance and 24 notifications of unconditional acceptance. The next day we sent out comments from the reviewers. One paper eventually met its acceptance conditions; the final program contained 25 contributed papers and 3 invited talks. The authors prepared final versions of the 25 contributed papers by February 28. It is our pleasure to thank the other 53 Program Committee members for lending their expertise to Africacrypt 2010 and for putting tremendous effort into detailed reviews and discussions. We would also like to thank Thomas Baigneres and Matthieu Finiasz for writing the iChair software; Springer for agreeing to an accelerated schedule for printing the proceedings; 70 external referees who reviewed individual papers upon request from the Program Committee; and, most importantly, all authors for submitting interesting new research papers to Africacrypt 2010.