Years of Cryptographic Hardware Design

Prof. Çetin Kaya Koç
UC Santa Barbara

Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 3:00pm-4:00pm
Engr IV Room 57-124

Abstract
The invention of public-key cryptography in the late 1970s is the driving force in significant advances in computer, network, and electronic commerce security in the following three decades. Our world now intricately depends on applications built on such security systems, such as Internet banking, wireless communications, and information servers. Not so surprisingly, fundamental algorithms of public-key cryptography (Diffie-Hellman, RSA, and ECC) are based on mathematical objects from number theory and algebra (finite rings and fields). However, the sizes of these objects are in the hundreds or thousands of bits, which makes calculations with them quite time- and power-consuming. This challenge was realized early on (since the early 1980s) by researchers who have proposed advanced algorithms and architectures to compute public-key cryptographic functions efficiently, i.e., without inordinate amounts of time and energy. In this talk, we will give a review of research on cryptographic hardware design during the last 30 years.

Biography
Çetin Kaya Koç (Koç ~ coach) received his Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1988. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston (1988-1992) and Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor at Oregon State University (1992-2007). He established the Information Security Laboratory at OSU, and graduated 14 Ph.D. students, 8 of whom are currently professors. In September 2001, he received the OSU College of Engineering Research Award for Outstanding and Sustained Research Leadership. His research interests are in cryptographic hardware and embedded systems, hardware security, side-channel attacks and countermeasures, algorithms, and architectures for computer arithmetic and finite fields. He has co-founded the Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (chesworkshop.org) in 1999 and has been the program chair and proceedings editor from 1999 to 2003. He is now a permanent member of the steering committee of CHES. Recently, he has also co-founded a new conference, the International Workshop on the Arithmetic of Finite Fields (waifi.org), which is a forum of engineers and mathematicians interested in efficient software and hardware realizations of finite fields. He has co-authored one book, Cryptographic Algorithms on Reconfigurable Hardware, published by Springer in 2006. His second book, Cryptographic Engineering, was just published by Springer in December 2008. He has been an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Computers and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and guest co-editor of two issues (April 2003 & November 2008) of IEEE Transactions on Computers on cryptographic and cryptanalytic hardware and embedded systems. He is an IEEE Fellow since 2007 for contributions to cryptographic engineering. Currently, Dr. Koç is an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science and the College of Creative Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara.