This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of EUROCRYPT '96, the 1996 International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptographic Techniques, held in Saragossa, Spain, in May 1996, under the sponsorship of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). The book contains revised versions of the 34 papers selected from a total of 126 submissions. All current aspects of the booming area of cryptologic research and advanced applications are addressed. There are sections on cryptanalysis, public key cryptosystems, new schemes and protocols, multi-party computation, proofs of knowledge, number theory and algorithms, secret sharing, pseudorandomness, cryptographic functions, key management and identification schemes, and digital signature schemes.