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 also hold the title of Docent, Information Security and Cryptography. I supervise Ph.D. and M.Sc. students interested in cryptography and related mathematical and engineering topics.

I am teaching COMP.SEC.230 Post-Quantum Cryptography Engineering in Spring 2025.

PQCrypto 2025

I was a Program Co-Chair of PQCrypto 2025 with Ruben Niederhagen. PQCrypto 2025 will be held at Academia Sinica in Taipei on April 8-10, 2025. PQCrypto 2025 proceedings: Part I - LNCS 15577 and Part II - LNCS 15578.

PQCrypto 2024

I was a Program Co-Chair of PQCrypto 2024 with Daniel Smith-Tone. PQCrypto 2024 was held at the University of Oxford Mathematical Institute on June 12-14, 2024. PQCrypto 2024 proceedings: Part I - LNCS 14771 and Part II - LNCS 14772.

CHES 2024 Artifact Evaluation

I was the Artifact Chair of IACR CHES 2024. This work has now concluded. Here are the CHES 2024 Artifacts.

Online Research Papers and Presentations (2021-)

• Talk at EUCA 2025 (March 27, 2025). Slides: “On Certifying PQC Implementations at “High” Assurance Level”.

• Keynote talk at AusQRC 2024 (November 18, 2024). Slides: “PQC Transition in Hardware: Processors, SoCs, IoT, Secure Elements”.

• Two talks at RISC-V Summit 2024 (October 21-23, 2024). Slides: “Marian: An Open-Source Implementation of the RISC-V Vector Cryptography Extension” and “Making the Case for a Keccak Instruction: Post-Quantum Cryptography on RVV”.

• Poster (with Thomas Szymkowiak and Endrit Isufi) at ACM CCS 2024 (October 14-18, 2024): “Marian: An Open Source RISC-V Processor with Zvk Vector Cryptography Extensions”. There’s a three-page abstract as an IACR e-Print. This will also appear in the proceedings.

• Invited talk at OPTIMIST 2024 (September 4, 2024). Slides: “Artifact Evaluation and Reproducibility (at CHES)”.

• Paper at CRYPTO 2024 (August 18-22, 2024): “Accelerating SLH-DSA by Two Orders of Magnitude with a Single Hash Unit”. Artifact. GitHub. IACR e-Print. Slides 2024-08-22.

• Paper at EUROCRYPT 2024 (May 26-30, 2024): “Threshold Raccoon: Practical Threshold Signatures from Standard Lattice Assumptions”. IACR e-Print. (with R. del Pino, S. Katsumata, M. Maller, F. Mouhartem, and T. Prest).

• Presentation at NIST PQC 2024 (April 11, 2024). Slides: “Accelerating SLH-DSA by Two Orders of Magnitude with a Single Hash Unit”.

• 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).

• Presentation at RISC-V Summit 2023 (November 8, 2023). Slides: “Benchmarking RISC-V Post-Quantum Crypto”.

• Presentation at ICCC 2023 (November 1, 2023). Slides: “Post-Quantum vs. AVA_VAN”.

• Paper at PQCrypto 2023 (August 16-18, 2023): “WrapQ: Side-Channel Secure Key Management for Post-Quantum Cryptography”. Slides 2023-08-18.

• Paper at SAC 2023 (August 16-18, 2023): “Mask Compression: High-Order Masking on Memory-Constrained Devices” (with M. Rossi). Slides 2023-08-16.

• Presentation in RISC-V Technical Sessions (June 29, 2023) Slides: “RISC-V Cryptography and Hardware Security”.

• Presentation at RISC-V Summit Europe 2023 (June 05, 2023) Slides: “Cryptography Extensions Update”.

• 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.)

• 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.)

• 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.)

• Presentation at NIST PQC Seminars (April 4, 2023). Slides: “Intro to Side-Channel Security of NIST PQC Standards”.

• Presentation at ETSI/IQC QSC9 (February 13-15, 2023). Slides: “PQC Side-Channel Leakage Assessments in the Semiconductor Industry”.

• Presentation at RISC-V Summit 2022 (December 13-14, 2022). Slides: “RISC-V Zkt: Portable Timing Attack Resistance via Dynamic Taint Analysis”.

• Presentation at ICMC 2022 (September 14-16, 2022). Slides: “Post-Quantum Crypto Side-Channel Tests and a CSP Walk-Through”.

• Short WiP paper at HOST 2022 (June 27-30, 2022): “WiP: Applicability of ISO Standard Side-Channel Leakage Tests to NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography”.

• Paper at Security Standardisation Research (SSR) ‘22 (June 6, 2022): “SP 800-22 and GM/T 0005-2012 Tests: Clearly Obsolete, Possibly Harmful”.

• Paper in J. Cryptographic Engineering (January 2022): “Development of The RISC-V Entropy Source Interface” (with G.R. Newell and B. Marshall).

• 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.

• The RISC-V Scalar Crypto specification is freely available and free for anyone to use. This was ratified in November 2021.

• ECW / Implementing PQC Workshop. Rennes, France (November 18, 2021). Slides: “Specifying and Testing PQC Hardware Modules”.

• 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).

• Real World Crypto ‘21 (January 13, 2021). Slides: “RISC-V Scalar Crypto” with B. Mashall.