Introduction to the CHES 2013 special issue

Abstract

The 15th edition of the International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded System took place at the University of California, Santa Barbara, during August 20– 23, 2013. This special issue hosts five extended versions of selected papers among those presented at the workshop. CHES is an established event in the landscape of scientific conferences on security; it is considered a reference event that brings together academia and industry focused in the field of applied cryptography. The workshop covers a wide spectrum of subjects, from new implementations of cryptographic algorithms, advances in the field of side channel and fault attacks, countermeasures and secure implementations, protocols and security aspects of device manufacturing. The 15th edition of CHES received 132 submissions. The 43 members of the Program Committee were assisted by more than 190 external reviewers. In total, they delivered 463 reviews. Eventually, the Program Committee selected 27 papers (a 20% acceptance rate) for publication in the proceedings. Among these 27 accepted papers, we have selected 5 that have received the best reviews in the process. Authors had the chance to extend their manuscripts, and extended manuscripts have been submitted to a second round of peer review. The first paper, fromThomazOliveira, Julio Lopez, Diego F. Aranha, and Francisco Rodriguez-Henriquez, is entitled “Two is the fastest prime: Lambda Coordinates for Binary Elliptic Curves”. In thiswork it is possible to see the advance-