Eurocrypt is one of the major crypto conferences sponsored by the IACR. It has been held yearly in various loctions in Europe, often France or England, since 1980. The conference proceedings are published as part of LNCS, by Springer.

Eurocrypt aims much more for theoretical work than conferences like Crypto and Fast Software Encryption; they generally refuse anything to do with new algorithms, unless it provides ground for interesting theoretical problems. Most of the papers submitted (and published) are related to either analysis of pre-existing algorithms, or new work in the fundamental theory of cryptography.

Eurocrypt is a highly respected conference, probably one of the top two or three crypto conferences in the world, and getting a paper published there is a good sign for your academic career (because odds are, if you're publishing in Eurocrypt, you're a professor or researcher). For not unrelated reasons, it also implies that a good 75% of what is published there is completely impractical, and generally useless to anyone. However, once in a while a piece of theory will come along that causes massive changes the field, like random oracles and (to a lesser extent) the wide trail design strategy.

To give you a feel for what kind of stuff goes on, I'm going to give the program listing for Eurocrypt 2002, which was held in Amsterdam between April 28 and May 2, 2002. For brevity, I will give only the titles of the papers, omitting the names of the authors and their institutions. You might notice that, even still, this is a huge number of papers. The conference was held over 2 and a half days, and each presenter only gets 25 minutes to explain their results.

I haven't read any of these papers yet (I don't know if the proceedings have even been published at the time of this writing, and if they have, my local library hasn't gotten a copy yet). I should try to provide a summary or abstract of each paper, but that would really make this writeup pretty huge. I've added some links so you can try to find a little more about each topic if it looks interesting to you.

  • Cryptanalysis of a Pseudorandom Generator Based on Braid Groups
  • Potential Weaknesses of the Commutator Key Agreement Protocol based on Braid Groups
  • Extending the GHS Weil Descent Attack
  • Universal Hash Proofs and a Paradigm for Adaptive Chosen Ciphertext Secure Public-Key Encryption
  • Key-Insulated Public Key Cryptosystems
  • On the Security of Joint Signatures and Encryption
  • AES and the wide trail design strategy (Invited Talk)
  • Indistinguishability of Random Systems
  • How to Fool an Unbounded Adversary with a Short Key
  • Cryptography in an Unbounded Computational Model
  • Performance Analysis and Parallel Implementation of Dedicated Hash Functions
  • Fault Injection and a Timing Channel on an Analysis Technique
  • Speeding Up Point Multiplication on Hyperelliptic Curves with Efficiently-computable Endomorphisms
  • Fast Correlation Attacks: an Algorithmic Point of View
  • BDD-based Cryptanalysis of Keystream Generators
  • Linear Cryptanalysis of Bluetooth Stream Cipher
  • Generic Lower Bounds for Root Extraction and Signature Schemes in General Groups
  • Optimal Security Proofs for PSS and Other Signature Schemes
  • Cryptanalysis of SFLASH
  • Cryptanalysis of the Revised NTRU Signature Scheme
  • Dynamic Group Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange under Standard Assumptions
  • Universally Composable Notions of Key-Exchange and Secure Channels
  • On Deniability in Quantum Key Exchange
  • A Practice-Oriented Treatment of Pseudorandom Number Generators
  • A Block-Cipher Mode of Operation for Parallelizable Message Authentication
  • Rethinking PKI: What's Trust Got to do with It? (Invited Talk)
  • Efficient Generic Forward-Secure Signatures With An Unbounded Number Of Time Periods
  • From Identification to Signatures via the Fiat-Shamir Transform: Minimizing Assumptions for Security and Forward-Security
  • Security Notions for Unconditionally Secure Signature Schemes
  • Traitor Tracing with Constant Transmission Rate
  • Toward Hierarchical Identity-Based Encryption
  • Unconditional Byzantine Agreement and Multi-Party Computation Secure Against Dishonest Minorities from Scratch
  • Perfectly Secure Message Transmission Revisited
  • Degree of Composition of Highly Nonlinear Functions and Applications to Higher Order Differential Cryptanalysis
  • Security Flaws Induced by CBC Padding - Applications to SSL, IPSEC, WTLS...