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Education and Innovation in Embedded Systems Design

USI Università della Svizzera italiana, USI Faculty of Informatics, Advanced Learning and Research Institute USI Università della Svizzera italiana USI Faculty of Informatics USI Advanced Learning and Research Institute

SAFEcrypto - Secure Architectures of Future Emerging Cryptography

SAFEcrypto will provide a new generation of practical, robust and physically secure post-quantum cryptographic solutions that ensure long-term security for future ICT systems, services and applications. Novel public-key cryptographic schemes (digital signatures, authentication, identity-based encryption (IBE), attribute-based encryption (ABE)) will be developed using lattice problems as the source of computational hardness.

The project will involve novel alghorithmic and design optimisations, and implementations of lattice-based cryptographic schemes addressing the cost, energy consumption, performance and physical robustness needs of resource-constrained applications, such as mobile and battery-operated devices, and of real-time applications, such as network security, satellite communications and cloud.

Currently a significant threat to cryptographic applications is that the devices on which they are implemented (e.g. processors, FPGAs, ASICs) leak sensitive information, which can be used to mount successful attacks to recover secret information. In SAFEcrypto the first comprehensive analysis and development of physical-attack resistant methodologies for lattice-based cryptographic hardware and software implementations will be undertaken integrated into the novel architectures proposed.

Effective models for the management, storage and distribution of the keys utilised in the proposed schemes (as key sizes may be in the order of kilobyts or megabytes) will also be provided.

This project will deliver proof-of-concept demonstrators of the novel lattice-based public-key cryptographic schemes for three practical real-world case studies with real-time performance and low power consumption requirements. In comparison to the current state-of-the-art implementations of conventional public-key cryptosystems (RSA-based and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based primitives), SAFEcrypto's objective is to achieve a range of lattice-based architectures that provide comparable area costs, a 10-fold speed-up in throughput for real-time application scenarios, and a 5-fold reduction in energy consumption for low-power emebedded and mobile applications.

 

Homepage http://www.safecrypto.eu
Head of project at USI Dr. Francesco Regazzoni
ALaRI Personnell Andres Felipe Valencia Patino
Starting date Thursday, January 1, 2015
Duration (months) 48
Partners involved The Queen's University of Belfast, UK;
Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, Germany;
ALaRI, Universita della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland;
INRIA, France;
Thales Research and Technology Limited, UK;
EMC Information Systems International Ltd., Ireland;
HWCommunications Ltd., UK;
Funding Agency EU's Horizon 2020
Research area Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing
Low Power
Security
Project ID ICT-644729
Status Ongoing