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.

I joined PQShield Ltd. in September 2018 as we were starting as a University of Oxford spin-out focusing on Post-Quantum Cryptography. I work on various things but I’m mainly responsible for cryptographic hardware IP and the PQSoC Post-Quantum Secure Element.

Current Public Research (2020)

• RISC-V On-Chip Random Number Generators. I worked with the RISC-V Cryptographic Extensions Task Group ( Crypto TG repo ) to map out the (FIPS 140-3) requirements for TRNGs. We have a paper coming out at ASHES 2020: Building a Modern TRNG: An Entropy Source Interface for RISC-V (with G.R. Newell and B. Marshall).

• AES and SM4 Instruction Set Extension for RISC-V. The lwaes repo was a contribution to RISC-V International, and evolved into the RV32 recommended “𝞶3” AES ISE. A short initial report appeared at SECRISC-V 2020: A Lightweight ISA Extension for AES and SM4. A much broader report with Crypto TG has been accepted to TCHES 2021/1: The design of scalar AES Instruction Set Extensions for RISC-V (with B. Marshall, G. R. Newell, D. Page, C. Wolf).

• Energy Budgets for Post-Quantum Cryptography: PQPS is a “lab” for power measurements of PQ crypto – basic PQC research for mobile and IoT security. There is a short write-up on this, published at IEEE MobileCloud 2020: Mobile Energy Requirements of the Upcoming NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards and also on arXiv.