This is the archive of news previously and currently shown on our main page. Seminars are posted on the seminar page. Our latest publications are posted on the publications page.
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2020
Javad Bahrami gave a talk at ASHES 2020
Javad Bahrami attended the Fourth Workshop on Attacks and Solutions in Hardware Security, ASHES 2020, a post-conference satellite workshop of the 27th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2020. The workshop was held on November 13, 2020. During this workshop, Javad Bahrami gave a talk titled "Lightweight Implementation of the LowMC Block Cipher Protected Against Side-Channel Attacks," based on the paper co-authored with Viet Ba Dang, Abubakr Abdulgadir, Khaled N. Khasawneh, Jens-Peter Kaps, and Kris Gaj. This year, ACM CCS and all its workshops, including ASHES, took place as virtual events. (11/14/2020)
Dr. Gaj served as a member of the Program Committee of DATE 2021
Dr. Gaj served as a member of the Program Committee of DATE 2021: Design, Automation and Test in Europe conference, in Track A5: Secure Systems, Circuits, and Architectures. Multiple student members of CERG contributed their time and expertise, serving as sub-reviewers for the mentioned above track. The virtual TPC Meeting was held on November 10, 2020. (11/11/2020)
Dr. Gaj gave the first talk of the PQC Round 3 Seminar Series
On October 27, 2020, Dr. Gaj gave the first talk of the newly launched Post-Quantum Cryptography Round 3 Seminar Series, organized by NIST. His talk was titled "Implementation and Benchmarking of Round 2 Candidates in the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process Using FPGAs." The corresponding slides and video recording are available here. The talk was based on the comprehensive GMU Round 2 report, "Implementation and Benchmarking of Round 2 Candidates in the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process Using Hardware and Software/Hardware Co-design Approaches," developed by Viet Ba Dang, Farnoud Farahmand, Michal Andrzejczak, Kamyar Mohajerani, Duc Tri Nguyen, and Kris Gaj. This report was published on Cryptology ePrint Archive, as Report 2020/795, for the first time in June 2020. It has been updated several times since then. The talk and report include an extensive literature review and unpublished results from GMU. The focus is on methodology and rankings. The NIST PQC team is planning to host future talks, open to the general public, devoted to Round 3 of the PQC process, approximately once per month using the Webex video conferencing software. These talks will be recorded by NIST, given closed-captioning, etc. The recordings will be posted on the NIST website. The talks will be divided into two tracks: Implementations - devoted to hardware and software benchmarking, software/hardware co-design, and side-channel analysis - and Algorithms - devoted to the design and analysis of post-quantum schemes, classical attacks, and quantum attacks. (10/28/2020)
Dr. Gaj gave a keynote speech at CryptoIC 2020
On October 27, 2020, Dr. Gaj gave a keynote speech at CryptoIC 2020. CryptoIC is a conference held annually by the Cryptographic IC Technical Committee of the Chinese Association for Cryptologic Research. Dr. Gaj's talk was titled "Benchmarking Post-Quantum & Lightweight Cryptography in Hardware." The conference was attended by more than 300 researchers from academia, industry, and research institutes. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, CryptoIC 2020 was converted into an all-digital event. The talk was given at the invitation of Dr. Leibo Liu, Secretary-General of Cryptographic IC Technical Committee of Chinese Association for Cryptologic Research. Some other keynote speakers included Dr. Bo-Yin Yang from Academia Sinica, Taipei; Dr. Nele Mentens from Leiden University and KU Leuven; and Dr. Sylvain Guilley from TELECOM-Paris / Institut Polytechnique de Paris and Secure-IC. The conference was organized by Harbin University of Science and Technology and Harbin Institute of Technology. (10/28/2020)
Duc T. Nguyen gave a poster presentation at ARC 2020
Duc T. Nguyen attended the 16th International Symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing, ARC 2020, held as a virtual event on October 26-27, 2020. During this conference, Duc gave a poster presentation titled, "Implementing and Benchmarking Number Theoretic Transform in Lattice-based Post-Quantum Cryptography using SW/HW Codesign and High Level Synthesis," based on the paper co-authored with Viet Ba Dang and Kris Gaj. (10/28/2020)
CERG released its report on FPGA benchmarking of Round 2 LWC candidates
On September 28, 2020, members of CERG released their technical report titled "FPGA Benchmarking of Round 2 Candidates in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standardization Process: Methodology, Metrics, Tools, and Results." The report was co-authored by Kamyar Mohajerani, Richard Haeussler, Rishub Nagpal], Farnoud Farahmand, Abubakr Abdulgadir, Jens-Peter Kaps, and Kris Gaj. The report was published first on the LWC web page of the CERG ATHENa project. After a few revisions, taking into account feedback from the readers, on October 2, 2020, the report was first published as the Cryptology ePrint Archive Report 2020/1207. The report is intended as a living document and will be updated at least until the end of 2020. (10/26/2020)
Dr. Kaps and Dr. Gaj gave a talk at the Lightweight Cryptography Workshop 2020
Multiple members of CERG attended the Lightweight Cryptography Workshop 2020, held on October 19-21, 2020. During this workshop, Dr. Kaps and Dr. Gaj gave a talk titled "FPGA Benchmarking of Round 2 Candidates in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standardization Process: Methodology, Metrics, Tools, and Results." The full agenda of the workshop is available here. (10/22/2020)
Dr. Gaj gave a keynote talk at China Test Conference 2020
Dr. Gaj gave a keynote talk at China Test Conference, CTC 2020, held on August 20-23, 2020. The talk was titled "Post-Quantum Cryptography in Hardware and Embedded Systems: Toward Choosing the Most Efficient and Flexible New Public Key Cryptography Standards." CTC is the annual conference of the China Computer Federation (CCF) Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing (TCFTC), which was established in 1985. In 2020, due to COVID-19, the conference was held both on-site and online simultaneously. Dr. Gaj's talk was given at the invitation of Dr. Jing (Justin) Ye, Secretary-General of CCF TCFTC and Associate Professor at State Key Laboratory of Computer Architecture, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. (08/25/2020)
Dr. Gaj gave an invited talk as a part of the CALAS seminar series
At the invitation of Dr. Ray C.C. Cheung and Dr. David Jingwei Hu, Dr. Gaj gave an invited talk as a part of the CALAS Crypto Seminar Series. The talk was titled "Implementation and Benchmarking of Round 2 Candidates in the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process Using FPGAs" and was held on August 19, 2020. CityU Architecture Lab for Arithmetic and Security (CALAS) is a research lab at the City University of Hong Kong, led by Dr. Ray C.C. Cheung, conducting cutting edge scholarly research activities in the areas of Reconfigurable Trusted Computing, VLSI/FPGA Circuit Design, Memory Architecture Design, Cryptography, System-on-Chip, High-Performance and Customizable Biomedical Computing, Embedded System Design, and Logic Synthesis. The CALAS seminar series is co-organized by Dr. David Jingwei Hu, who is a postdoctoral research fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Dr. Hu received his Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from the City University of Hong Kong in 2018. His current research interests include post-quantum cryptography and fully homomorphic encryption. Dr. Hu co-invented the post-quantum algorithm called piglet, which won 3rd place in the cryptographic design competition held by the Chinese Association for Cryptologic Research in 2019. (08/19/2020)
Farnoud Farahmand defended his Ph.D. Thesis
Farnoud Farahmand defended his Ph.D. Thesis, titled "Efficient and Secure Implementation of Secret-key and Post-quantum Public-key Cryptography with Applications in Internet of Things, Hardware Security, and Cloud Computing," on July 30, 2020. The members of his dissertation committee included Dr. Gaj (Chair), Dr. Kaps, Dr. Sasan, and Dr. Diehl. In June 2020, Farnoud accepted the position of the SoC Power Engineer at Apple. (07/31/2020)
CERG released its report on benchmarking of Round 2 PQC candidates
On June 2, 2020, members of CERG released their technical report titled "Implementation and Benchmarking of Round 2 Candidates in the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process Using Hardware and Software/Hardware Co-design Approaches." The report was co-authored by Viet Ba Dang, Farnoud Farahmand, Michal Andrzejczak, Kamyar Mohajerani, Duc Tri Nguyen, and Kris Gaj. The report was published first on the PQC web page of the CERG ATHENa project. After a few revisions, taking into account feedback from the readers, on June 25, 2020, the report was first published as the Cryptology ePrint Archive Report 2020/795. The report is intended as a living document and will be updated at least until the end of 2020. (06/26/2020)
Dr. Kaps, Dr. Gaj, and Dr. Diehl gave progress report to the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Team
On April 20, 2020, Dr. Kaps, and Dr. Gaj, and Dr. Diehl gave a progress report to the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Team, titled "Hardware Benchmarking of Candidates in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standardization Process." The online meeting was led by Kerry McKay and Meltem Sonmez Turan. The meeting was attended by several members of the NIST LWC Team, several student members of the Signatures Analysis Laboratory (SAL) at Virginia Tech, and multiple members of CERG. (04/21/2020)
Dr. Gaj scheduled to give a talk at VTS 2020
Dr. Gaj is scheduled to give a talk at the IEEE VLSI Test Symposium 2020 (Virtual Conference), held on April 27 - May 31, 2020. His presentation titled, "Challenges and Rewards of Post-Quantum Cryptography Revolution: A Hardware Perspective," is a part of the special session on The Recent Advance in Hardware Implementation of Post-Quantum Cryptography, organized by Dr. Ujjwal Guin from Auburn University. The entire session is based on the joint paper, titled "Special Session: The Recent Advance in Hardware Implementation of Post-Quantum Cryptography," co-authored by Jiafeng Xie, Kanad Basu, Kris Gaj, and Ujjwal Guin. (04/24/2020)
Michael Lyons gave a presentation at DATE 2020
Michael Lyons gave a short presentation at the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Virtual Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2020, held on April 21 - May 31, 2020. This presentation was based on the paper titled "Sampling from Discrete Distributions in Combinational Hardware with Application to Post-Quantum Cryptography," co-authored with Dr. Gaj. (04/22/2020)
CERG paper published in proceedings of ARC 2020
CERG paper titled "High-Level Synthesis in Implementing and Benchmarking Number Theoretic Transform in Lattice-based Post-Quantum Cryptography using Software/Hardware Codesign," co-authored by Duc Tri Nguyen, Viet B. Dang, and Kris Gaj, was published in the proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing, ARC 2020, originally scheduled in Toledo, Spain, on April 1-3, 2020. Due to the concerns regarding COVID-19, the conference itself has been postponed to a later date. (04/04/2020)
Dr. Kaps and Dr. Gaj moved their Spring 2020 courses online
Starting on March 23, Dr. Kaps and Dr. Gaj moved their courses, taught in Spring 2020, online. These courses include: ECE 476/CYSE 476: Cryptography Fundamentals and ECE 448: FPGA and ASIC Design with VHDL. A distance-education platform used for delivering these courses is Blackboard Collaborate Ultra. In ECE 476/CYSE 476 students get familiar with selected implementations of cryptographic algorithms and protocols and with the FOBOS side-channel analysis platform, which can be now accessed remotely from student homes. (03/24/2020)