SHARCS'09 - Special-purpose Hardware for Attacking Cryptographic
Systems

September 9-10, 2009
Lausanne, Switzerland
www.sharcs.org

Note that the workshop takes place directly after CHES, also at
EPFL. It will be possible to attend both workshops in succession.


SHARCS'09 is the fourth workshop dedicated to the challenging subject
of special-purpose cryptanalytical devices. This field is still a very
young one (at least outside government agencies). In addition to key
search machines a la Deep Crack and COPACOBANA, we are in
particular interested in the interaction between cryptanalytical
algorithms and computer hardware and in exploiting alternative
computation platforms such as Playstation-3 and graphics processing
units which offer interesting price/performance tradeoffs.  Much work
in this area remains to be done including, for instance, special
purpose hardware crackers for:

  * index calculus algorithms
  * elliptic curve based schemes
  * lattice based schemes
  * hidden field equation schemes
  * specific block and stream ciphers
  * algebraic cryptanalysis and SAT solvers
  * hash functions, particularly SHA-1 and SHA-2

In addition to algorithmic issues, it is also the workshop's goal
to make advances in computer hardware issues such as:

  * analog and optical computing for cryptanalysis
  * novel VLSI technologies for cryptanalysis
  * reconfigurable computing for cryptanalysis
  * clusters of standard computers for cryptanalysis
  * clusters of GPUs or Playstation-3s for cryptanalysis
  * routing protocols and other low-level tools
  * models and evaluation techniques for special-purpose computing
  * lower bounds for physical implementations of cryptanalytic algorithms

There are three main objectives for SHARCS:

(1) to determine whether special purpose hardware poses a real threat
for today's cryptographic algorithms,

(2) to determine reliable security estimates and explicit strength
comparisons for today's "best-practice" algorithms (i.e., how long are
RSA1024 or ECC160 "secure"; how many bits of security does one really
get when using RSA2048) and

(3) to advance the knowledge in cryptanalysis in general.

Since this is an intrinsically interdisciplinary subject,
it is hoped that the workshop can bring together researchers with
different backgrounds for discussing and advancing this exciting
field.

At SHARCS, submitted contributions are presented together with invited
talks from world-leading experts.


Submissions

The workshop will consist of invited presentations and contributed
talks. We welcome submissions of extended abstracts. Papers analyzing
algorithms, hardware architectures, new technologies and costs of
attacks using specialized hardware, high-performance computers, or
alternative computation platforms are very much welcomed.  We would
like to stress that we do not aim at receiving contributions on side
channel attacks.

There will be no formal proceedings, but a handout with papers will
be provided to all participants. (This approach avoids submissions to
SHARCS from conflicting with submissions to forthcoming conferences
with proceedings.)


Important dates:

May 09, 2009:   submission of abstracts

May 16, 2009:	submission of full papers

July 06, 2009:   notification of acceptance

August 19, 2009: revised version of accepted papers due

September 9-10, 2009:    SHARCS workshop in Lausanne

Note that no new papers will be accepted after the submission 
of abstracts deadline (May 09); it is still possible to modify 
the submission until May 16.

The submission should start with a title, a list of the authors
together with their affiliations and a short abstract describing
the content of the paper. This should be followed by an extended
abstract of at least 5 and at most 20 pages including appendices.
The authors of accepted papers must guarantee to present their
paper at the workshop.

A submission server will be made available soon and the information
will be posted here.

Program Committee:

  * Daniel J. Bernstein (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA)
  * Roger Golliver (Intel Corp, USA)
  * Tim Gueneysu (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany)
  * Marcelo E. Kaihara (EPFL, Switzerland)
  * Tanja Lange (Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands), co-chair
  * Arjen K. Lenstra (EPFL, Switzerland and Alcatel-Lucent Bell Laboratories, USA), co-chair
  * Christof Paar (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany)
  * Jean-Jacques Quisquater (Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
  * Eran Tromer (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
  * Michael J. Wiener (Cryptographic Clarity, Canada)


Organization:

The workshop is organized by the European Network of Excellence
(ECRYPT II). SHARCS is an activity of ECRYPT's VAMPIRE - Virtual
Application and Implementation Research Lab.

Local organizer:
    Martijn Stam (EPFL, Switzerland) 

Past SHARCS workshops:

The first workshop took place 2005 in Paris, SHARCS'06 took place in
Cologne, and SHARCS'07 took place in Vienna. All three workshops
attracted participants from industry, academia and government
organizations.  Slides and papers from the previous workshops can be
found online at 
      www.sharcs.org