Welcome

Welcome to the Cryptography and Information Security Laboratory at WPI. There are many resources (papers, theses etc.) available on this Web site.

Upcoming Crypto Seminar:

Lightweight Cryptography for RFIDs and such

Christof Paar, Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany
Tuesday 7/24/7 @ 1:30pm, Atwater Kent Laboratories Room 218

Abstract

For many years, the cryptographic engineering community had worked on the problem of implementing symmetric and asymmetric ciphers as fast as possible. Typical problems were RSA accelerators or high-speed DES engines. However, the advent of ubiquitous computing has led to many pervasive devices which are extremely cost-constrained. Probably the most extreme example are RFID tags, but there are numerous other pervasive computing application -- ranging from automotive parts over sensor networks to consumer products such as computer gadgets -- which are extremely cost sensitive and for which cryptographic solutions have to be provided with an optimized cost-performance ratio. In this talk, I will present our research over the last few years in the area of lightweight cryptography. In the symmetric case, surprisingly the oldest block cipher, DES, has among the best low-resource properties among established ciphers. We developed a lightweight variant of DES, dubbed DESL, which further reduces the area requirements and can provide a security level of 112 bit. More recently we designed (together with researchers from France Telecom and the Technical University of Denmark) PRESENT, the first modern block cipher which was aggressively designed for lightweight applications such as RFID. PRESENT can be implemented with about 1500 gates. For asymmetric solutions, efficient hardware implementations of elliptic curve cryptosystems will be presented. We will describe a tiny ECC hardware engine which can provide full-size elliptic curves with as little as 10,000 gates and execution time

Prof. Lou receives new grant from the National Science Foundation

The project entitled "CT-ISG: Broadcast/Multicast Security in Multi-User Wireless Sensor Networks," proposed by Wenjing Lou (PI), and Berk Sunar effective August 1 , 2007 and expires July 31, 2008 was awarded by the US National Science Foundation the amount of $137,200.

New Workshop on the Arithmetic of Finite Fields

WAIFI 2007 CFP: (PDF)
PC-Chairs: Berk Sunar WPI, and Claude Carlet University of Paris 8, France.

The focus of this workshop is to have a forum bringing together mathematicians, engineers and physicists researching on finite field arithmetic to communicate and advance in the theory, applications and implementations of such fields. The workshop will help to bridge the gap between the mathematical theory of finite fields and their hardware/software implementations and technical applications.

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Last modified: Jul 20, 2007, 15:36 EDT