Projects
New foundations for the integral cryptanalysis of symmetric primitives in the weak-key and fixed-key context KU Leuven
In symmetric key cryptography encryption and authentication schemes are built from smaller components, called primitives. The most used primitives are block ciphers and more recently also permutations. The security of these schemes is dependent on the security of the primitives they are instantiated with, and many techniques have already been developed to analyze these primitives. One of these techniques is integral cryptanalysis, which ...
Lightweight MPC-friendly Symmetric Ciphers KU Leuven
The goal of this PhD thesis is to study modern lightweight symmetric ciphers (e.g. Prince, Skinny, Noekeon, etc.) to be used in secure multi-party computation both theoretically and in practice by providing efficient implementations. The research will identify bottlenecks and apply optimizations to reduce computational cost and resource usage.
Advanced Methods in Cryptanalysis KU Leuven
Cryptology (i.e., secret- or code-writing) is an important aspect of modern day life and economy. Roughly speaking, cryptology can be viewed as being composed of two parts: cryptography, which deals with the design of crypto algorithms, and cryptanalysis (sometimes called code-breaking), which deals with the security assessment of these algorithms. As a civilian field, progress in cryptanalysis has always been tied to advances in ...
CRYPTOGRAPHY: Cryptografie beveiligd tegen side-channel attacks en fault attacks door middel van begin van implementaties KU Leuven
Research Area
The traditional application of cryptography is the protection of communication lines. Here one usually assumes that both sender and receiver have equipment that is protected by physical means against attacks. In modern applications like payment cards, set-top boxes, DRM protection, …, this assumption is no longer true. The attacker often has physical access to the device that is executing the cryptographic algorithm, and ...
Design of Application-specific Hash Functions KU Leuven
The security of symmetric-key cryptographic constructions is often studied based on the assumption that underlying primitives are secure. Hence, well-analyzed primitives are extremely important for the design of efficient and secure cryptographic schemes and protocols. Unfortunately, only a few types of dedicated primitive designs have received sufficient attention from the cryptanalysts. Therefore, it is necessary to build generic building ...
Design and Analysis of Lightweight Symmetric-Key Primitives KU Leuven
This thesis tackles the broad domain of symmetric-key cryptography. As the domain in itself is very versatile and in continuous development, the thesis approaches the subject of symmetric-key cryptography from different angles, leading to a deeper connection of the reader to this broad subject. As symmetric-key cryptography assumes both offensive and defensive actors, this thesis adheres to both. Therefore, the first chapters of the thesis ...
Algorithmic Countermeasures Against Passive and Active Physical Attacks KU Leuven
Symmetric key cryptography has been the corner stone in defending applications against cyber attacks. Ever since the proposal of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), people were able to protect their information technology using top of the line cryptography. Nevertheless, even the top of line symmetric cryptography is endangered when placed in an embedded device.
In 1999, an attack called differential power analysis was made public to ...
Automated techniques for the cryptanalysis and design of symmetric-key ciphers and protocols. KU Leuven
Cryptography is the study of mathematical techniques that ensure the confidentiality and integrity of information. This relatively new field started out as classified military technology, but has now become commonplace in our daily lives. Cryptography is not only used in banking cards, secure websites and electronic signatures, but also in public transport cards, car keys and garage door openers. Two building blocks in the domain of ...
DRASTIC: Dynamically Reconfigurable Architectures for Side-channel analysis protecTIon of Cryptographic implementations KU Leuven
This project proposes the use of dynamic hardware reconfiguration as a countermeasure against one of the most exploited types of SCA attacks, namely power analysis attacks. The goal is to randomly change the hardware circuit without altering the input-output behaviour of the chip. Since power analysis attacks are strongly based on the knowledge of the circuit, this is a very promising countermeasure. Another advantage is that ...