Energy efficiency and security for cryptographic algorithm implementations

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Presented at ParisCryptoDay 2017 by

Ingrid Verbauwhede

Energy and power efficiency is an extremely important optimization goal when implementing applications on any digital platform. This is important for light-weight InternetOfThings devices as well as high end servers and cloud computing. The first one requires a long battery life, the second one needs to reduce the cost of cooling (and the electricity bill). The energy and power optimization also holds for the implementation of cryptographic algorithms. Our goal is to build devices that can perform the mathematically demanding cryptographic operations in an efficient way. At the same time, we request that the implementations are also secure against a wide range of physical attacks, including side-channel attacks. Unfortunately countermeasures to side-channel attacks impose an extra cost. This presentation will focus on the implementation aspects of cryptographic operations and how to balance the computation requirements with the resource constraints. These concepts will be illustrated with the design of several cryptographic co-processors, secret key, public key and new generation of post-quantum secure algorithms.