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In February 2004, at the Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya, we presented a
45-hour Advanced Course on Contemporary Cryptology, organised by the Centre
de Recerca Matem`atica. This volume is an expanded and unified version of the
material presented in the lectures and the background material that we distributed
among the participants.
As the title implies, our aim in the course and in this text is to treat selected
topics of the subject of contemporary cryptology, structured in five quite independent
but related themes: Efficient distributed computation modulo a shared
secret, multiparty computation, modern cryptography, provable security for public
key schemes, and efficient and secure public-key cryptosystems. The beauty
and multidisciplinarity of this topic motivated the interest of the participants, to
whom we are very much indebted for their helpful contributions.
Thanks are due to the Centre de Recerca Matem`atica for organising and
sponsoring the Advanced Course, to the CRM administrative staff for smoothly
working out innumerable details, and to Paz Morillo for the mathematical organisation
of the course and for making it such a pleasant experience. Special thanks
go to all the participants of the course for their interest in the event and for their
many comments on the material. |