IACR CHES 2009, Preface

CHES 2009, the eleventh workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, was held in Lausanne, Switzerland, September 6-9, 2009. The workshop was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR).

The workshop attracted a record number of 148 submissions from 29 countries, of which the Program Committee selected 29 for publication in the workshop proceedings, resulting in an acceptance rate of 19.6%, the lowest in the history of CHES. The review process followed strict standards: each paper received at least four reviews, and some as many as eight reviews. Members of the program committee were restricted to co-authoring at most two submissions, and their papers were evaluated by an extended number of reviewers.

The Program Committee included 53 members representing 20 countries and five continents. These members were carefully selected to represent academia, industry, and government, as well as to include world-class experts in various research fields of interest to CHES. The Program Committee was supported by 148 external reviewers. The total number of people contributing to the review process, including Program Committee members, external reviewers, and Program Co-chairs, exceeded 200.

The papers collected in this volume represent cutting-edge worldwide research in the rapidly growing and evolving area of cryptographic engineering. The submissions were sought in several general areas, including, but not limited to, cryptographic hardware, cryptographic software, attacks against implementations and countermeasures against these attacks, tools and methodologies of cryptographic engineering, and applications and implementation environments of cryptographic systems. Ten years after its first workshop, CHES is now very firmly established as the premier international forum for presenting scientific and technological advances in cryptographic engineering research, the event that bridges the gap between theoretical advances and their practical application in commercial products.

In order to further extend the scope of CHES, this year's CHES included for the first time a special Hot Topic Session. The goal of this session was to attract new authors and attendees to CHES by highlighting a new area, not represented at CHES before, but of potential interest to CHES participants. The topic of this year's Hot Topic Session was: Hardware Trojans and Trusted ICs. The session was chaired by Anand Raghunathan from Purdue University, USA, who prepared a separate call for papers, and oversaw an evaluation of papers submitted to this session. This evaluation was supported by a special Hot Topic Session Committee, composed of six experts in the field of trusted integrated circuit manufacturing. The session included two regular presentations, and an invited talk, entitled "The State-of-the-Art in IC Reverse Engineering," delivered by Randy Torrance from Chipworks, Inc., Canada.

Additionally, the workshop included two other excellent invited talks. Christof Paar from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, one of the two founders of CHES, discussed his vision of cryptographic engineering, and its evolution over years, in a talk entitled "Crypto Engineering: Some History and Some Case Studies." Srini Devadas, MIT, an inventor of PUF (Physical Unclonable Function), and a founder of a company that develops practical products based on this new technology, described his experiences in a talk entitled "Physical Unclonable Functions and Secure Processors."

The workshop also included two special sessions. Elisabeth Oswald chaired a session on the DPA contest, which included an introduction and discussion of the contest by one of the primary contest organizers, Sylvain Guilley from Telecom ParisTech. Following the introduction was a short presentation by the winners of the contest and a panel discussion devoted to the current and future rules of the contest and the ethical issues associated with inadvertently facilitating through the contest practical attacks against implementations of cryptography. The second special session, chaired by Patrick Schaumont from Virginia Tech, was on benchmarking of cryptographic hardware. The session included several interesting short talks on problems and solutions related to fair and comprehensive evaluation of performance of cryptographic hardware. This session was of particular significance in light of the ongoing evaluation of the SHA-3 candidates competing to become a new American, and a de-facto worldwide, hash function standard. Additionally, the workshop included two traditional events: a rump session, chaired by Guido Bertoni from STMicroelectronics, Italy, and a poster session chaired by Stefan Mangard, Infineon Technologies, Germany. Our great thanks go to all special session chairs for their initiative, enthusiasm, commitment, innovative spirit, and attention to every detail of their respective sessions.

Through a nomination process and a vote, the Program Committee awarded three CHES 2009 Best Paper Awards. The selected papers represent three distinct areas of cryptographic engineering research: efficient hardware implementations of public key cryptography, efficient and secure software implementations of secret key cryptography, and side-channel attacks and countermeasures. The winners of the three equivalent awards were: Jean-Luc Beuchat, Jérémie Detrey, Nicolas Estibals, Eiji Okamoto, and Francisco Rodríguez-Henríquez for their paper "Hardware Accelerator for the Tate Pairing in Characteristic Three Based on Karatsuba-Ofman Multipliers," Emilia Käsper and Peter Schwabe for their paper "Faster and Timing-Attack Resistant AES-GCM," and Thomas Finke, Max Gebhardt, and Werner Schindler for their paper "A New Side-Channel Attack on RSA Prime Generation."

The selection of 29 best papers out of 148 predominantly very strong submissions was a very challenging and difficult task. The Program Committee members have dedicated a very significant amount of time and effort in order to comprehensively and fairly evaluate all submitted papers and provide useful feedback to the authors. Our deepest thanks go to the members of the Program Committee for their hard work, expertise, dedication, professionalism, fairness, and team spirit.

We deeply thank Marcelo Kaihara, the General Chair of CHES 2009, for his excellent and always timely work on managing the local organization and orchestrating conference logistics. Only because of his tireless effort, flexibility, and team spirit, were we able to fit so many additional events, and special sessions in the program of this year's CHES. We would like to also thank EPFL for providing an excellent venue for holding the workshop, and for assisting with many local arrangements. Our gratitude goes also to the generous sponsors of CHES 2009, namely, Cryptography Research, Inc., Nagravision Kudelski Group, Oberthur Technologies, RCIS AIST Japan, Riscure, and Telecom ParisTech.

We are also very grateful to çetin Kaya Koç for managing conference announcements and advertising as the Publicity Chair, and to Jens-Peter Kaps for diligently maintaining the CHES web site. The review and discussion process was run using an excellent Web Submission and Review System developed and maintained by Shai Halevi, who was always very quick and precise in addressing our questions and concerns regarding the operation of the system.

We would like to deeply thank the Steering Committee of CHES, for their trust, constant support, guidance, and kind advice on many occasions. Special thanks go to Jean-Jacques Quisquater and Colin Walter, who were always first to respond to our questions and concerns, and often volunteered the advice and support needed to resolve a wide array of challenging issues associated with the fair, firm, and transparent management of the evaluation process.

Finally, we would like to profoundly thank and salute all the authors from all over the world who submitted their papers to this workshop, and entrusted us with a fair and objective evaluation of their work. We appreciate your creativity, hard work, and commitment to push forward the frontiers of science. All your submissions, no matter whether accepted or rejected at this year's CHES, represent the vibrant field of research that CHES is proud to exemplify.