Abstracts of invited talks

Neil Costigan (Dublin City University, Ireland)
The Cell processor as a cryptographic engine
Abstract:
IBM's promotion of the Cell processor as a generic number-crunching workhorse coupled with widescale deployment as the heart of Sony's Playstation 3 multimedia console make it an interesting choice as a cryptographic processor. In this talk I examine the Cell architecture, development capabilities,and its suitability as a platform for cryptographic applications.

James Hughes (Sun Microsystems, USA)
Highly Threaded SPARC Architectures
Abstract:
The future for processor architectures is becoming clear. Massive parallelism is coming to commodity servers. This presentation will discuss the architecture and features of the new 2 socket and 4 socket Victoria Falls systems. The four socket machine contains 32 cores, 256 threads and up to 256GB of RAM in a NUMA architecure running Solaris. Issues discussed will be system diagrams, interconnect, bandwidth, OS issues for managing memory, thread mapping, etc. Additionally, potential future SPARC instructions and memory architectures will also be discussed.

Christian Rechberger (IAIK Graz, Austria)
Dedicated Collision Search
Abstract:
One of the biggest challenges in practical cryptanalysis, finding a collision for SHA-1, is underway (http://boinc.iaik.tugraz.at). While a lot of progress has been made in recent years, the computational requirements are still huge. In this talk, I review our most recent cryptanalytic methods and discuss implementation issues. Which platforms will give the best price/performance ratio?