Since 1999, the workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems
(CHES) is the foremost international scientific event dedicated to all aspects
of cryptographic hardware and security in embedded systems. Its 12th edition
was held in Santa Barbara, California, USA, August 17–20, 2010. Exceptionally
this year, it was co-located with the 30th International Cryptology Conference
(CRYPTO). This co-location provided unique interaction opportunities for the
communities of both events. As in previous years, CHES was sponsored by the
International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR).
The workshop received 108 submissions, from 28 different countries, of which
the Program Committee selected 30 for presentation. Each submission was reviewed
by at least 4 committee members, for a total of 468 reviews. Two invited
talks completed the technical program. The first one, given by Ivan Damg˚ard
and Markus Kuhn, was entitled “Is Theoretical Cryptography Any Good in
Practice?”, and presented jointly to the CRYPTO and CHES audiences, on
Wednesday, August 18, 2010. The second one, given by Hovav Shacham, was
entitled “Cars and Voting Machines: Embedded Systems in the Field.”
The Program Committee agreed on giving a best paper award to Alexandre
Berzati, C´ecile Canovas-Dumas and Louis Goubin, for their work “Public Key
Perturbation of Randomized RSA Implementations.” These authors will also be
invited to submit an extended version of their paper to the Journal of Cryptology,
together with the authors of two other contributions. First, Jean-Philippe Aumasson,
Luca Henzen,Willi Meier and Mar´ıa Naya-Plasencia, authors of “Quark:
a Lightweight Hash.” Second, Luca Henzen, Pietro Gendotti, Patrice Guillet, Enrico
Pargaetzi, Martin Zoller and Frank K. G¨urkaynak, for their paper entitled
“Developing a Hardware Evaluation Method for SHA-3 Candidates.” These papers
illustrate three distinct areas of cryptographic engineering research, namely:
physical (aka implementation) security, the design of lightweight primitives and
the efficient hardware implementation of cryptographic algorithms.
We would like to express our deepest gratitude to the various people who
helped in the organization of the conference and made it a successful event. In
the first place, we thank the authors who submitted their works. The quality of
the submissions and the variety of the topics that they cover are reflective of an
evolving and growing research area, trying to bridge the gap between theoretical
advances and their practical application in commercial products. The selection
of 30 papers out of these strong submissions was a challenging task and we sincerely
thank the 41 Program Committee members, as well as the 158 external
reviewers, who volunteered to read and discuss the papers over several months.
They all contributed to the review process with a high level of professionalism,
expertise and fairness. We also acknowledge the great contribution of our invited
speakers. We highly appreciated the assistance of C¸etin Kaya Ko¸c and
Jean-Jacques Quisquater, the General Co-chairs of CHES 2010, and the help of
the local staff at the University of California Santa Barbara. A big thank-you to
Tal Rabin, the Program Chair of CRYPTO 2010, for the good collaboration and
discussions which allowed a nice interaction between CRYPTO and CHES. We
owe our gratitude to Shai Halevi, for maintaining the review website, to Jens-
Peter Kaps, for maintaining the CHES website, and to the staff at Springer, for
making the finalization of these proceedings an easy task. We also express our
gratitude to our generous sponsors, namely: Cryptography Research, Riscure,
Technicolor, Oberthur Technologies, the Research Center for Information Security
and Telecom ParisTech. And finally, we would like to thank the CHES
Steering Committee for allowing us to serve at such a prestigious workshop.