Introduction to the CHES 2015 special issue

Excerpt

This Special Issue of the Journal of Cryptographic Engineering (JCEN) presents extended versions of selected works presented at the 17th International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems that was held in Saint-Malo, France from September 13 to 16, 2015. The workshop was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research. With more than 430 participants, CHES is one of the best-attended events among all the scientific conferences on security. One of its major goals is to bridge theory and practice in academic research on cryptography with a strong focus on secure implementations and deployment. In this sense, the conference brings together experts from academia and industry to explore the field of applied cryptography in the broader context of embedded systems. The workshop covers a wide spectrum of subjects, from new implementations of cryptographic algorithms, to advances in the field of side channel and fault attacks, to countermeasures and secure implementations, and protocols and security aspects of device manufacturing. CHES 2015 received 128 submissions from all parts of the globe. Each paper was reviewed by at least four independent reviewers, with papers from program committee members receiving at least five reviews. The 44 members of the program committee were aided in this complex and time-consuming task by a further 210 external reviewers, resulting in a total of more than 510 reviews written during the paper selection process. From the 128 submissions, 34 were chosen for presentation at the workshop. They represented all areas of research including constructive and destructive topics reflecting a mix of theoretical and practical results that make CHES such an appealing and successful workshop. Focusing our attention even further, from these 34 accepted papers we have selected five that were particularly well-received during the review process. Furthermore, they represent a wide range of typical CHES topics, including leakage assessment techniques, timing attacks on protected implementations, key generation techniques from physically unclonable functions (PUF), side-channel countermeasures for modern cryptographic implementation and a cryptanalytic improvement on a widely practically used cipher. The authors of these papers were invited to submit extended manuscripts to JCEN and these extended manuscripts underwent a second round of peer review. The papers that successfully passed this process are the following. …