Workshop on Tools for Asymmetric Cryptanalysis

Ruhr-University Bochum is organizing a one-day workshop on Tools for Asymmetric Cryptanalysis with a forthcoming whitepaper as part of the EU horizon 2020 ECRYPT-CSA project. The workshop will take place on October 8, 2015 in Bochum, Germany.

This workshop aims to provide an overview of the state of art for tools in asymmetric cryptanalysis. This covers both software as well as hardware. The workshop's major goal is to identify the current needs and open problems for cryptanalytic tools by the scientific community, governmental institutions and the industry.

The workshop will be held in the Beckmannshof on the university campus of Ruhr-University Bochum – a traditional German farm that was recently renovated. The workshop is open to interested parties based on available space. Registration is mandatory, but due to funding from ECRYPT-CSA, there is no registration fee.

Confirmed speakers

• Martin Albrecht
• Daniel Dadush
• Léo Ducas
• Thomas Johansson
• Thijs Laarhoven

Website: http://cryptool.hgi.rub.de/

Future Directions in Computing on Encrypted Data

We are hosting a two day workshop to discuss the future road map for research and potential commercial applications of technologies for computing on encrypted data. The workshop will discuss various supporting technologies such as

• Multi-Party Computation (MPC)
• Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)
• Symmetric Searchable Encryption (SSE)

as well as other related technologies. The workshop will examine applications to areas such as data anonymization, network defence, privacy, auctions, and key management.

The workshop will consist of introductory talks on the technology, as well as presentations by SMEs in the space, funders, legal experts and others. It will end with a panel session to discuss the barriers for adoption, future research directions and other matters.

Details of the workshop can be found here.

Welcome Dusan!

We are proud to announce that we could win another excellent candidate for NXP filling our second open ESR position. Dusan will complete the ECRYPT-NET team at NXP (Ventzi, Miro, Florian and Simon -- see our last post) in October.

Dusan will conduct research on cryptography for passively powered devices. Current countermeasures against physical attacks focus on specific attacks and therefore fail against combined (e.g., fault and differential power) attacks. However, the overhead for adding such countermeasures is enormous. Dusan will investigate new methods (like threshold implementations) and design approaches (e.g., leakage resilient crypto). In addition, his goal - as well as Simon's - is to target efficiency in dedicated hardware and/or embedded software.

Welcome Dusan! We wish you an exciting and successful time within ECRYPT-NET. Now, the ECRYPT-NET team at NXP is looking forward to the first meeting of the complete ECRYPT-NET family co-located with the IACR School on Design and Security of Cryptographic Algorithms and Devices on Sardinia in October.