On 23 June, IAIK graduate Samuel Weiser  has received his doctorate “sub auspiciis” at TU Graz. Along with two other TU graduates, Michael Kalcher and Thomas Ulz, he was awarded this highest honor in Austrian education, bestowed for exclusively top performances up to the doctorate.
The three graduates received honorary rings from govenor Hermann Schützenhöfer. 

In his dissertation, Samuel Weiser analysed so-called enclaves, special security technologies for computer processors that are able to protect sensitive programmes from malware and untrustworthy system operators.

Read the full article here (in German)

The US National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has announced the 10 finalists for the last round of the Lightweight Crypto (LWC) Competition.
The goal of this competition is to standardize a lightweight authenticated encryption algorithm suitable for constrained environments.
It started in 2019 with 56 Round-1 candidates and is expected to select a winner for standardization in 2022.

We are very proud that the finalists include all our 3 submissions:

• Ascon, previously selected as primary choice for lightweight cryptography by the CAESAR committee, designed by Christoph Dobraunig, Maria Eichlseder, Florian Mendel, and Martin Schläffer

• ISAP, a design with inherent robustness against certain implementation attacks, designed by Christoph Dobraunig, Maria Eichlseder, Stefan Mangard, Florian Mendel, Bart Mennink, Robert Primas, and Thomas Unterluggauer

• Elephant, a parallel design by Tim Beyne, Yu Long Chen, Christoph Dobraunig, and Bart Mennink.

For the full list of 10 finalists, see NIST.

The title image shows a marine sponge, the namesake of the cryptographic sponge construction adapted in Ascon and ISAP.

Listen to the Technical AI Safety podcast on Safe Reinforcement Learning via Shielding with Bettina Könighofer of IAIK and Rüdiger Ehlers of Clausthal University of Technology, Germany.
More details on the episode can also be found here.

We welcome Sujoy Sinha Roy as assistant professor in cryptographic engineering at IAIK. Sujoy is interested in the implementation aspects of cryptography. He is a co-designer of ‘Saber’ which is a finalist in NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Project. He received the PhD degree in 2017 with ‘Summa cum laude with congratulations from the examination committee’ from COSIC, KU Leuven, Belgium. His doctoral thesis was awarded the ‘IBM Innovation Award 2018’ that recognizes an outstanding doctoral thesis in informatics. Before joining TU Graz, he worked as an assistant professor at the University of Birmingham’s Security and Privacy group.