Cryptographic primitives or protocols without a rigorous proof cannot be regarded as secure in practice. There are many schemes that are originally thought as secure being successfully cryptanalyzed, which clearly indicates the need of formal security assurance. With provable security, we are confident in using cryptographic applications to replace the traditional way in physical world. Unfortunately, schemes with provable security sometimes give only theoretical feasibility rather than a practical construction, and correctness of the proofs may be difficult to verify. The conference ProvSec provides a platform for researchers, scholars and practitioners to exchange new ideas for solving these problems in the provable security area.

The first conference ProvSec (provable security) was successfully held on Nov. 1st-2nd, 2007 at the University of Wollongong, Australia. The proceedings is published in LNCS Vol. 4784. The second conference ProvSec 2008 will be held in Shanghai, China, Oct. 30th - Nov. 1st, 2008. The proceedings will continue to be published in Springer-Verlag's Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. Besides the regular paper track, the conference also plan to host a short paper track in which the selected papers will be published in the Journal of Shanghai Jiaotong University (Science), which is currently indexed by EI.

ProvSec 2008 is in cooperation with Chinese Association for Cryptologic Research (CACR) and Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), sponsored by Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU).