Author's Latest Posts


Secure Implementation Of Post-Quantum Crypto In The Spotlight


The US-based NIST body takes a leading role in the migration to Post-Quantum Crypto (PQC). After a multi-year selection process, in 2022 they preliminarily identified a number of Post Quantum algorithms, which were recommended to replace the current public key algorithms (RSA, ECC). While the process of scrutiny is still ongoing, they now took another important step by putting emphasis on imple... » read more

Security Highlight: Ascon


The contest for standardization of a lightweight crypto (LWC) algorithm has just finished. US standards body NIST selected Ascon as the winner. Ascon is an algorithm proposed by an international team of scientists that delivers strong performance and security at a low cost. How does that work? Lightweight crypto is symmetric encryption technology, that runs well on constrained systems, lik... » read more

Security Highlight: Exploiting Persistent Faults In Crypto


At the most recent CHES workshop, Hossein Hadipour of the Graz University of Technology presented an important step forward in exploiting persistent faults in crypto. Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) is a well-known attack class that can lead to the compromise of a secret key when faults are injected during the execution of a cryptographic implementation. However, injecting transient fault... » read more

Security Highlight: Evil Never Sleeps


Recently, Apple introduced a useful but potentially dangerous feature to its iPhones. Most of us would assume that a phone becomes inactive when switched off by the user or due to low power. Surprisingly, newer phones continue limited functionality for several hours in low power mode or even if it is off. This includes cards in your Wallet and the Find My service. This feature caught the attent... » read more