New Professor: Maria Eichlseder

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We are excited that Maria Eichlseder will join IAIK as an assistant professor for Cryptography. Maria’s research interests include the design and cryptanalysis of symmetric cryptographic algorithms, such as hash functions and authenticated encryption algorithms and their underlying primitives. She co-designed Ascon, a lightweight authenticated cipher that is among the winners of the CAESAR competition. She defended her Ph.D. sub auspiciis praesidentis in 2018, for which she received an award of excellence from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research and a sponsorship prize of the Technology and Society Forum. Before that, she studied Computer Science and Technical Mathematics at Graz University of Technology.

Ascon – the primary choice for lightweight crypto

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Ascon has been selected as the primary recommendation for lightweight authenticated encryption in the final portfolio of the CAESAR competition!

The CAESAR competition started in 2014 with the goal of identifying excellent authenticated encryption schemes for three use-cases:
lightweight applications, high-performance software applications, and defense-in-depth.
The competition received 57 first-round candidate submissions, which were narrowed down to 6 final portfolio ciphers after 5 years of analysis and benchmarks by the international research community: a primary and a secondary recommendation for each use-case.

Our candidate Ascon is designed to be a lightweight solution for constrained devices without sacrificing cryptanalytic security, implementation security & robustness, and efficiency on other platforms.
Ascon was designed by Christoph Dobraunig (Radboud University Nijmegen), Maria Eichlseder, Florian Mendel (Infineon), and Martin Schläffer (Infineon).
We want to thank Hannes Groß (SGS) for his excellent work on hardware implementations of Ascon.

We hope the story doesn’t end here, as the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is currently looking for lightweight authenticated ciphers for standardization.
NIST’s LightWeight Cryptography (LWC) Competition started in spring 2019, with two submissions co-authored by IAIK researchers: Ascon and ISAP, a lightweight design focusing on robustness against implementation attacks. Both advanced to Round 2 in August 2019!

More information…

Picnic and SPHINCS+ selected for round 2 of NIST PQC project

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Picnic and SPHINCS+, two post-quantum secure digital signature schemes designed by teams involving cryptographers from IAIK, have been selected as round 2 candidates of the NIST PQC project. More information on the two submissions can be found on the Picnic and SPHINCS+ websites.

Sub Auspiciis Promotion Dobraunig & UnterluggauerLunghammer, TU Graz

Christoph Dobraunig and Thomas Unterluggauer graduate sub auspiciis praesidentis

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For their remarkable performance during their academic career as students, Christoph Dobraunig and Thomas Unterluggauer receive their PhD on 23 November 2018 from the Federal President of Austria, Prof. Alexander Van der Bellen. More information (in German)…

New Professor: Daniel Gruss

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We are delighted that Daniel Gruss will join us as an assistant professor. Daniel finished his PhD with distinction in less than 3 years. He has been involved in teaching operating system undergraduate courses since 2010. Daniel’s research focuses on software-based attacks and defenses on microarchitectural layers in hardware and software. He implemented the first remote fault attack running in a website, known as Rowhammer.js. He frequently speaks at top international venues, such as Black Hat, Usenix Security, IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, Chaos Communication Congress, and others. His research team was one of the teams that found the Meltdown and Spectre bugs published in early 2018 and designed the software patch (KAISER) against Meltdown which is now integrated in every operating system.

Publication of Meltdown and Spectre

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IAIK researchers are part of the international research team that publish critcial vulnerabilities in modern processors: https://meltdownattack.com/

Stefan Mangard receives ERC consolidator Grant

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The project “SOPHIA – Securing Software against Physical Attacks” focuses on securing processors against all kinds of side channel attacks.

Christian Rechberger Joins IAIK

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We are delighted to welcome Christian Rechberger to our team ass a full professor for Cryptography. After completing a PhD in Graz, Christian became a postdoc at KU Leuven and then ENS in Ulm. In 2011, Christian accepted a position as an associate professor at DTU in Denmark. From 2008-2013 Christian coordinatied the hash function working group within the ECRYPT II Network of Excellence. Christian’s research interests are in symmetric cryptography.

Stefan Mangard Joins IAIK

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We are very happy to announce that Stefan Mangard will join our institute as a full professor for Information Security. Stefan is author of a textbook on power analysis attacks. Before joining us, Stefan worked as lead security architect at the Chip Card and Security division of Infineon in Munich.

Rigorous Systems Engineering

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We are proud to announce that we have been awarded a National Research Network grant from FWF. RiSE is the only network grant in Computer Science in Austria. It’s goal is to bring the state of the art in formal methods from after-the-fatct verification to formal methods to help designers write correct code from the get-go. The grant is coordinated by IAIK’s Roderick Bloem and is a collaboration of Armin Biere (Linz), Krishnendu Chatterjee (IST Austria), Uwe Egly (TU Wien), Thomas A. Henzinger (IST Austria), Christoph Kirsch (Salzburg), Helmut Veith (TU Wien), and Ulrich Schmid (TU Wien).