Seminars

Unless indicated otherwise, the CryptoSeminar is being held in the Atwater Kent building on the WPI Worcester campus. The Atwater Kent building is at the intersection of Salisbury Street and the extension of West Street (labeled "Private Way"). See directions to campus.

The talks are 30-45 minutes long and are open to everyone.

Refreshments are usually being served 15 minutes before the talk. There is no fee and no formal registration. If you are attending a Seminar for the first time, a short e-mail to Profs. Berk Sunar or Bill Martin, saying that you would like to attend, would be appreciated.

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

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Last modified: Jul 20, 2007, 15:27 EDT