This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th Annual International Cryptology Conference, CRYPTO '96, held in Santa Barbara, California, USA, in August 1996 under the sponsorship of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). The 30 revised full papers presented in the volume were selected from a total of 130 submissions; they are organized in topical sections on hashing and authentication, new systems, cryptoanalysis, hard bits, signatures, zero knowledge, symmetric systems, Diffie-Hellman oracle, quantum cryptography, stream ciphers, and secret sharing. All in all, this book is a current report on the state-of-the-art in the field.