The second International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network
Security (ACNS 2004) was sponsored and organized by ICISA (the International
Communications and Information Security Association). It was held in Yellow
Mountain, China, June 8–11, 2004. The conference proceedings, representing
papers from the academic track, are published in this volume of the Lecture
Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) of Springer-Verlag.
The area of research that ACNS covers has been gaining importance in recent
years due to the development of the Internet, which, in turn, implies global
exposure of computing resources. Many fields of research were covered by the
program of this track, presented in this proceedings volume. We feel that the
papers herein indeed reflect the state of the art in security and cryptography
research, worldwide.