Secure Entities for Smart Environments

Our group focuses on the design and secure implemetation of cryptographic primitives. In particular, we study four main topics:

The IMPA Lab investigates all types of implementation attacks (side-channel analysis, fault analysis, probing attacks, etc.), which pose a serious threat to all types of crypto devices (smart cards, RFID tags, embedded systems, etc.). Based on the experiences gained in the attacks, we develop efficient countermeasures for hardware and software implementations of crypto devices.
RFID Security: Our main motivation is to provide state-of-the-art and standardized crypto solutions for passive RFID technology. To achieve this, it is necessary to design dedicated HW crypto modules that fulfil ultra low power requirements. The vision of our research is to enable a Secure Internet of Things based on passive RFID devices with real crypto capability.
Our research in Cryptography is supervised by the cryptologist Vincent Rijmen. Vincent Rijmen is the co-designer of the algorithm Rijndael, which in October 2000 was selected by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to become the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
VLSI Design: We focus on secure application specific hardware implementations of cryptographic algorithms. The requirements for our developments are deduced from real word applications to find the best fitting optimization goals. Investigations on design methodologies and specific implementation issues (area efficiency, low-power, low energy, high-throughput, SCA protection) of symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic algorithms like AES, ECC, SHA, DES or RSA are performed.

Secure Entities for Smart Environments

Available Student Projects

Members

Alumni