Introduction to the CHES 2012 special issue

Abstract

The 14th International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES 2012) was held at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, during September 9–12, 2012. This special issue presents expanded versions of 5 of the best ranked papers from the CHES Workshop. The CHES Workshop covers new results on all aspects of the design and analysis of cryptographic hardware and software implementations. The workshop builds a bridge between the cryptographic research community and the cryptographic engineering community. Since its inception in 1999, CHES has grown into the flagship event for the cryptographic engineering community. In this special issue, you will find 5 of the best ranked papers among the 120 submissions received by theworkshop. These papers were identified based on the review scores of the CHES review process, and the expanded journal submissions of these papers received an additional, independent peer-review. The five papers in this special issue reflect the broad spectrum of topics that is typically found in a CHES workshop and include physical hardware security, novel hardware architectures, and novel implementation attacks using faults and side-channel analysis. The first paper, “Simple Photonic Emission Analysis of AES”, is by Alexander Schlosser, Dmitry Nedospasov, Juliane Kramer, Susanna Orlic, and Jean-Pierre Seifert. The authors describe how direct optical observation of on-chip transistor switching enables sidechannel analysis. The second paper, “On the Use of Physical