Evolution of Lightweight Cryptography

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Axel Poschmann

DATE: Friday, December 16th, 2011
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-003, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 11.30

ABSTRACT:
For the dawning age of ubiquitous computing myriads of ultra-constrained pervasive devices, such as smart cards or RFID tags, will be deployed.
Lightweight cryptography aims at providing hardware implementations of cryptographic algorithms with a minimal area footprint for cost-constrained applications.
In this talk, first the evolution of lightweight block cipher design will be reviewed. Different design strategies and optimization techniques for both general purpose (s.a. AES) and dedicated lightweight block ciphers (PRESENT, EPCBC) are compared. Subsequently, the emerging topic of lightweight hash function design (PHOTON) and its close coupling to lightweight block cipher design (LED) is presented.

BIO:
Axel Poschmann is an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. In 2009 he received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, where he also graduated as an IT security engineer (2005); both under supervision of Christof Paar. In 2008 he received a Master degree in business studies from University Hagen, Germany. From 2009 to 2011 he worked as a post-doctoral research fellow with the Coding and  Cryptography Research Group at NTU. He is the editor of the IACR book reviews, co-editor of the ISO standard 29192-2 on lightweight block ciphers, and one of the designers of the award-winning block cipher PRESENT. His primary research interests include lightweight cryptography and side channel aspects for pervasive devices.

HOST: Prof. Mariagiovanna Sami and Dr. Francesco Regazzoni