Abstract: Hardware security is the root of trust in all modern ICT systems! Depending which community you address, it has a different meaning. It covers efficient, secure implementations of new generations of cryptography such as light-weight crypto, post-quantum crypto as well as advanced schemes such as zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, and computing on encrypted data in general. On top, implementations also must resist a wide variety of side-channel, fault, and micro-architectural attacks. Post-quantum algorithms promise to resist the attacks developed for quantum computers. Yet, their implementations also must resist attacks on classic platforms. Besides crypto, secure systems rely on many more security modules, requiring analog and digital circuit techniques to design quality true random number generators, physically unclonable functions, secure key storage, and many more. A recent report on “Revitalizing the U.S. Semiconductor Ecosystem” (from Executive Office of the President, President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, September 2022) describes a set of recommendations on semiconductors and system security. In this presentation, we will demonstrate how our research addresses these recommendations, and we will illustrate this with recent results.

Bio: Dr. Ir. Ingrid Verbauwhede is a Professor in the research group COSIC at KU Leuven. She is a fellow of IEEE and of IACR. She is a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium. She received the IEEE 2017 Computer Society Technical Achievement Award. She delivered the 2022 IACR distinguished lecture. She received the 2023 IEEE Don Pederson award for “pioneering contributions to energy-efficient and high-performance secure integrated circuits and systems”, and the 2024 EDAA Achievement Award. She received two EU ERC Advanced Grants: one in 2016 and a second one in 2021. She is a pioneer in the field of efficient and secure implementations of cryptographic algorithms on many different platforms: ASIC, FPGA, embedded, and cloud. With her research, she bridges the gaps between electronics, the mathematics of cryptography, and the security of trusted computing. Her group owns and operates an advanced electronic security evaluation lab at the KU Leuven. Her list of publications is available from https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/people/ingrid-verbauwhede/ or https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ZyG1ZGgAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao