Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen
Professional
I’m a cryptographer – one of those people who professionally build and sometimes break cryptosystems. Here’s a recent CV and a clickable list of publications.
Since January 2023, I have been a Professor of Practice (työelämäprofessori) at Tampere University, associated with the Network and Information Security Group (NISEC) and the SoC HUB.
I joined PQShield Ltd. in September 2018 as we were starting this University of Oxford spin-out for Post-Quantum Cryptography solutions. I am no longer actively involved with PQShield.
PQCrypto 2024 and 2025
I was the Program Co-Chair (with Daniel Smith-Tone) of PQCrypto 2024, which was held at the University of Oxford Mathematical Institute on June 12-14, 2024. The PQCrypto 2024 proceedings are now out from Springer: Part I - LNCS 14771 and Part II - LNCS 14772.
I will be also the program Chair of PQCrypto 2025 with Ruben Niederhagen. This will be held in Taipei on April 8-10, 2025. We will be posting further information as it is decided.
CHES 2024 Artifact Evaluation
I’m the Artifact Chair of IACR CHES 2024. Authors of papers accepted to CHES 2024 / Transactions of Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (TCHES) are invited to submit artifacts associated with their papers, such as software or datasets, for review, in a collaborative process between authors and the artifact review committee.
Here are the CHES 2024 Artifacts published thus far.
Research Papers and Presentations (2021-)
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Paper at CRYPTO 2024 (August 18-22, 2024): “Accelerating SLH-DSA by Two Orders of Magnitude with a Single Hash Unit.” Artifact: SLotH in github.
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Paper at EUROCRYPT 2024 (May 26-30, 2024): “Threshold Raccoon: Practical Threshold Signatures from Standard Lattice Assumptions” (with R. del Pino, S. Katsumata, M. Maller, F. Mouhartem, and T. Prest).
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Presentation at NIST PQC 2024 (April 11, 2024). Slides: “Accelerating SLH-DSA by Two Orders of Magnitude with a Single Hash Unit.”
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Presentation at Real World Crypto 2024 (March 25, 2024). Slides: “RISC-V Cryptography Evolution: High Assurance and Post-Quantum Cryptography” (with G. R. Newell and N. Brunie).
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Presentation at RISC-V Summit 2023 (November 8, 2023). Slides: “Benchmarking RISC-V Post-Quantum Crypto.”
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Presentation at ICCC 2023 (November 1, 2023). Slides: “Post-Quantum vs. AVA_VAN.”
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Paper at PQCrypto 2023 (August 16-18, 2023): “WrapQ: Side-Channel Secure Key Management for Post-Quantum Cryptography.” Slides 2023-08-18.
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Paper at SAC 2023 (August 16-18, 2023): “Mask Compression: High-Order Masking on Memory-Constrained Devices” (with M. Rossi). Slides 2023-08-16.
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Posting on pqc-forum: OFFICIAL COMMENT: ALTEQ (July 18, 2023) Here’s some code: ALTEQ 1.0 Implementation and forgery demo.
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Presentation in RISC-V Technical Sessions (June 29, 2023) Slides: “RISC-V Cryptography and Hardware Security.”
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Presentation at RISC-V Summit Europe 2023 (June 05, 2023) Slides: “Cryptography Extensions Update.”
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Submission to NIST Call for Additional PQC Signatures (June 1, 2023): “Raccoon: A Side-Channel Secure Signature Scheme.” (with Rafaël del Pino, Thomas Espitau, Shuichi Katsumata, Mary Maller, Fabrice Mouhartem, Thomas Prest, and Mélissa Rossi.)
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Submission to NIST Call for Additional PQC Signatures (June 1, 2023): “LESS: Linear Equivalence Signature Scheme.” (with Marco Baldi, Alessandro Barenghi, Luke Beckwith, Jean-Francois Biasse, Andre Esser, Kris Gaj, Kamyar Mohajerani, Gerardo Pelosi, Edoardo Persichetti, Paolo Santini, and Robert Wallace.)
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Presentation at IEEE SP 2023 (May 22, 2023) Slides: “High-Order Masking of Lattice Signatures in Quasilinear Time.” (with Rafaël del Pino, Thomas Prest, and Mélissa Rossi.)
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Presentation at NIST PQC Seminars (April 4, 2023). Slides: “Intro to Side-Channel Security of NIST PQC Standards.”
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Presentation at ETSI/IQC QSC9 (February 13-15, 2023). Slides: “PQC Side-Channel Leakage Assessments in the Semiconductor Industry.”
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Presentation at RISC-V Summit 2022 (December 13-14, 2022). Slides: “RISC-V Zkt: Portable Timing Attack Resistance via Dynamic Taint Analysis.”
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Presentation at ICMC 2022 (September 14-16, 2022). Slides: “Post-Quantum Crypto Side-Channel Tests and a CSP Walk-Through.”
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Short WiP paper at HOST 2022 (June 27-30, 2022): “WiP: Applicability of ISO Standard Side-Channel Leakage Tests to NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography.”
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Paper at Security Standardisation Research (SSR) ‘22 (June 6, 2022): “SP 800-22 and GM/T 0005-2012 Tests: Clearly Obsolete, Possibly Harmful.”
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Paper in J. Cryptographic Engineering (January 2022): “Development of The RISC-V Entropy Source Interface” (with G.R. Newell and B. Marshall).
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Paper at AsianHOST 2021 (December 16-18, 2021): “On Entropy and Bit Patterns of Ring Oscillator Jitter.” Some code examples are available in the bitpat repo. December 2021.
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The RISC-V Scalar Crypto specification is freely available and free for anyone to use. This was ratified in November 2021.
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ECW / Implementing PQC Workshop. Rennes, France (November 18, 2021). Slides: “Specifying and Testing PQC Hardware Modules.”
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CHES 2021 (13-17 September, 2021): Paper: “The design of scalar AES Instruction Set Extensions for RISC-V” (with B. Marshall, G. R. Newell, D. Page, C. Wolf).
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Real World Crypto ‘21 (January 13, 2021). Slides: “RISC-V Scalar Crypto” with B. Mashall.