This book constitutes the strictly refereed proceedings of the International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptology and Information Security, ASIACRYPT '96, held in Kyongju, Korea, in November 1996. The 31 revised full papers presented together with three invited contributions were carefully selected from a total of 124 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on discrete log based systems, efficient algorithms, hash functions and block cyphers, cryptographic protocols, signature and identification, visual secret sharing, key distribution, Boolean functions, electronic cash, special signatures, stream ciphers, and hard problems.