LAUSR

Provable security is an important research area in information security and aims to give a mathematical guarantee that a scheme is secure. Primitives or protocols without a rigorous security proof cannot be regarded as secure in practice. In fact, there are many schemes that were originally thought to be secure but eventually broken, which clearly indicates the need for provable security in information security. This special section of the International Journal of InformationSecurity is devoted to four of the best papers presented at the 10th International Conference on Provable Security (ProvSec 2016), held on November 10–11, 2016, at Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, Nanjing, China. Compared with the version published in the conference proceedings, each of the four papers included in this special issue was significantly extended, in every case involving the addition of at least 30%newcontent. These papers underwent a further two rounds of review by at least three reviewers, following the usual procedures for the journal, to ensure the quality was of an appropriate standard for journal publication. The first paper, Integrity analysis of authenticated encryption based on stream ciphers by Kazuya Imamura, Kazuhiko Minematsu, and Tetsu Iwata, addresses the security of authenticated encryption based on a stream cipher and a universal hash function. The authors analyze the integrity of ChaCha20-Poly1305 and the generic constructions pro-