The 19th International Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES 2017) was held in Taipei, Taiwan, during September 25-28, 2017. The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research.
CHES 2017 received 130 submissions. Each paper was anonymously reviewed by at least four Program Committee members in a double-blind peer-review process. Submissions co-authored by PC members received at least five reviews. With the help of 212 external reviewers our 48 Program Committee members wrote a total of 552 reviews. CHES continued the policy that submissions needed to closely match the final versions published by Springer in length and format. Additionally, the new paper submission policy from last year was applied whereby authors needed to indicate conflicts of interest with Program Committee members. A rebuttal process complemented again the review process and the Program Committee finally selected 33 papers for publication in these proceedings.
Of the two papers that were nominated for the CHES 2017 best paper award the Program Committee decided to give the award to Nanofocused X-Ray Beam To Reprogram Secure Circuits by Stéphanie Anceau, Pierre Bleuet, Jessy Clédière, Laurent Maingault, Jean-luc Rainard, and Rémi Tucoulou. The second nominee was High-Order Conversion From Boolean to Arithmetic Masking by Jean-Sébastien Coron. Together with Blockcipher-based Authenticated Encryption: How Small Can We Go? by Avik Chakraborti, Tetsu Iwata, Kazuhiko Minematsu, and Mridul Nandi all three papers were invited to submit extended versions to the Journal of Cryptology.
The technical program was completed by an invited talk by Shih-Lien Lu from TSMC about HW security: A Foundry Perspective. Furthermore, CHES 2017 also featured a poster session which was kindly chaired by Oscar Reparaz. Like the years before, two tutorials on the first day of the conference were hold: One by Colin O'Flynn on Side Channel Live! and one by Tim Güneysu on Post-Quantum Cryptography for Embedded Systems.
Many people contribute to such a big conference: First of all, we would like to thank all the authors who submitted their excellent research to CHES 2017. After all, it is their results what the conference is about and without them, it would not exist. We are very much indebted to the members of the Program Committee and their external reviewers for their effort over an extended period of time to select the papers for the program. The review process and the editing of the final proceedings were greatly supported by the software written by Shai Halevi. We further thank the General Chairs, Chen-Mou Cheng and Bo-Yin Yang, for organizing all aspects of the conference in such a great location. A special thanks goes to Peter Schwabe who provided us with his pleasant website. We always could count on his prompt support. We are grateful to Emmanuel Prouff, Thomas Baignères, Matthieu Finiasz, Pascal Paillier, and Matthieu Rivain who were organizing our CHES challenge and to Oscar Reparaz who was serving as the poster session chair. We are also grateful for the financial support received from our many generous sponsors.
July 2017 Wieland Fischer