The Third International Conference on Security in Communication Networks 2002 (SCN 2002) was held in the Salone Morelli of the Civic Museum of Amal?, Italy, September 11-13, 2002. The conference takes place every three years (p- vious ones were held in 1996 and 1999 in Amal? too) and aims to bring together researchers in the ?eld of security in communication networks to foster coop- ation and the exchange of ideas. The main topics included all technical aspects of data security including: anonymity implementation, authentication, key distribution, block ciphers, - erating systems security, complexity-based cryptography, privacy, cryptanalysis, protocols, digital signatures, public key encryption, electronic money, public key infrastructure, hash functions, secret sharing, identi?cation, surveys, and the state of the art. The program committee received 90 submissions in electronic format from 5 continents of which 24 were selected for presentation in 8 sessions.
We had two invited talks, one by Eyal Kushilevitz from the Technion, Israel on "Some ApplicationsofPolynomialsfortheDesignofCryptographicProtocols,"andthe other by Ueli Maurer from ETH, Zurich, on "Secure Multi-Party Computation Made Simple." Due to the high number of submissions, the reviewing phase was a very challenging process, and many good submissions had to be rejected. We are very grateful to all the program committee members, assisted by their colleagues, who devoted much e?ort and valuable time to read and select the papers.