Cryptographic Hardware
and
Engineering Workshop
(CHEW 2012)

The last decade has seen some phenomenal developments in the area of cryptographic engineering. With the development of applications, like e-commerce, e-governance, cryptography in hand-held devices, implementation of ciphering algorithms is a challenging task. The various specifications and requirements of these applications impose a wide range of constraints to the designers. Various engineering tricks need to be learnt and developed to cater to the performance driven implementations of the mathematically complex algorithms. However the metrics for performance vary from extremely high speed requirements to light weight implementations, where the most important criteria are power and resource usage. Further research shows that conventional techniques for VLSI implementations result in “unsafe” designs; these designs end up in leaking information to the adversary through measurable physical quantities called “side channels”. Various forms of side channels have been discovered, like power, timing, and behavior under faults, which make the designer to incorporate further tricks. Protections against side channels, while satisfying the specifications of the applications, is an uphill task which the modern day crypto-engineer has to face. Detection of malicious circuits in hardware designs, and ensuring that the IP is “trusted” is another area where significant research is needed. Techniques like “Physically Unclonable Functions” (PUF) seem to provide a state-of-the-art solution, but their practicality and effectiveness is what the world of crypto-engineers is presently working on. The present short term course aims to learn these areas and develop knowledge base in the country from leading experts in this field. The proposed course comprises of lectures and practical sessions for all the three important aspects: design, testing, attacks and trust in the area of crypto-engineering. The course is proposed to be hosted at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, which has been working in the area of crypto-engineering for the last ten years. It is expected that an opportunity to host such a work-shop with the invited experts, the scientists from DRDO, and the researchers at IIT Kharagpur will help to grow a wonderful base for future research and cutting edge outputs in this important area.

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