SHARCS'06 - Special-purpose Hardware for Attacking Cryptographic Systems

SHARCS'06 is the second workshop dedicated to the challenging subject of special-purpose cryptanalytical machines. The first SHARCS workshop took place 2005 in Paris and attracted 120 participants from industry, academia and government organization. In the upcoming workshop we intend to include more contributed talks and therefore encourage submissions to the areas listed below.

Much of the earlier work on special-purpose hardware was done on key searches for symmetric-key algorithms, with a particular emphasis on attacks against DES. More recently there has been interest in hardware architectures for sieving methods for attacking the RSA scheme. However, it seems that much work remains to be done including, for instance, special purpose hardware crackers for:

• index calculus algorithms
• elliptic curve based schemes
• lattice based schemes
• specific block and stream ciphers

In addition to algorithmic issues, it is also the workshop's goal to make advances on implementational issues such as:

• optical devices for cryptanalysis
• analog computers for cryptanalysis
• FPGAs for cryptanalysis
• clusters of standard computers for cryptanalysis
• routing protocols and other low-level tools

The ultimate objective of SHARCS is to determine whether special purpose hardware poses a real threat for today's cryptographic algorithms, and whether there are advantages over software-based attacks. Since this is an intrinsically interdisciplinary subject, it is hoped that the workshop can bring together researchers with different backgrounds for discussing and advancing this exciting field.


The workshop will consist of invited keynote presentations and some contributed presentations. We welcome submissions of extended abstracts (at least 3 pages.) We would like to stress that we do not aim at receiving contributions on side channel attacks. Furthermore, at this point we exclude quantum cryptologic devices. Theoretical papers analyzing the feasibility and costs of attacks using specialized hardware are, however, very much welcomed.

Invited Speaker:

The following speakers have confirmed giving an invited talk:

• Jens Franke (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität Bonn)
  On the factorization of RSA200
• Kris Gaj (George Mason University)
  Implementing the Elliptic Curve Method of Factoring in Reconfigurable Hardware
• Alan Gara (BlueGene System Architect, IBM)
  BlueGene/L: An overview and exploration into unique architectural features that can be exploited for cryptanalysis.
• Yusuf Leblebici (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
  How Much Faster Can We Go? : A Technology Outlook

The workshop is organized by the European Network of Excellence (ECRYPT). The workshop is an activity of ECRYPT's VAMPIRE - Virtual Application and Implementation Research Lab.

Workshop venue:

SHARCS'06 takes place in Cologne, Germany, April 03-04, 2006, in the Dorint Kongress Hotel.

Call for papers:

There will be no formal proceedings, but a handout with abstracts will be provided to all participants. (This avoids submissions to SHARCS from conflicting with submissions to forthcoming conferences with proceedings).

Call for contributions:

• SHARCS_CFP_2006.txt
• Sharcs06.doc

Important dates:

February 17, 2006:	submission of abstracts
March 06, 2006:	notification of acceptance or rejection
March 20, 2006:	revised version of accepted papers
April 03 & 04, 2006:	SHARCS workshop

The submission should start with a title, a list of the authors together with their affiliations and a short abstract describing the content of the paper. This should be followed by an extended abstract of at least 3 and at most 20 pages including appendices. The authors of accepted papers must guarantee to present their paper at the workshop.

List of accepted papers for SHARCS'06

• A. Bogdanov, M.C. Mertens,
  C. Paar, J. Pelzl, A. Rupp, "SMITH - A Parallel Hardware Architecture for fast Gaussian Elimination over GF(2)"
  
  
• Philippe Bulens, Guerric Meurice de Dormale and Jean-Jacques Quisquater,
  "Hardware for Collision Search on Elliptic Curve over GF(2^m)"
  
  
• Iain Devlin and Alan Purvis,
  "A fundamental evaluation of 80 bit keys employed by hardware oriented stream ciphers"
  
  
• Claus Diem,
  "Index Calculus in Class Groups of Non-Hyperelliptic Curves of Genus 3 from a Full Cost Perspective"
  
  
• Tim Güneysu, Christof Paar, Jan Pelzl,
  "On the Security of Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems against Attacks with Special-Purpose Hardware"
  
  
• Naoyuki Hirota, Tetsuya Izu, Noboru Kunihiro, and Kazuo Ohta,
  "An Evaluation of the Sieving Device YASD for 1024-bit Integers"
  
  
• Thorsten Kleinjung,
  "Cofactorisation strategies for the number field sieve and an estimate for the sieving step for factoring 1024 bit integers"
  
  
• Sandeep Kumar, Christof Paar, Jan Pelzl, Gerd Pfeiffer, Andy Rupp, Manfred Schimmler,
  "How to Break DES for € 8,980"
  
  

The timetable can be found here.

Program Committee:

• Daniel J. Bernstein (University of Illinois at Chicago)
• Tanja Lange (Technical University of Denmark)
• Arjen Lenstra (Lucent Technologies/Eindhoven Technical University)
• Christof Paar (Ruhr-University Bochum)
• Eran Tromer (Weizmann Institute of Science)

Colossus in Bletchley park

At last SHARCS, Tony Sale talked about the rebuilt colossus in Bletchley park. Currently, the Codes and Ciphers Heritage Trust is raising funds to build a museum in H block. So the initial conflict that BPT wanted to sell the property seems to be resolved. To actually build the museum, donations are still warmly welcome.

Contact:

For further information please contact
info@sharcs.org

Organization:

SHARCS is organized within ECRYPT - European Network of Excellence for Cryptology. We aknowledge the support by the European Commission under the IST program, IST-2002-507932.

Sponsors:

	We acknowledge organizational support from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT-Security.
	We acknowledge organizational support from Department of Mathematics, Technical University of Denmark.

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