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 this University of Oxford spin-out where we build Post-Quantum Cryptography solutions.

Current Research

• 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 (1November 18, 2021). Slides: “Specifying and Testing PQC Hardware Modules” at

• 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.

• IEEE MobileCloud 2020: “Mobile Energy Requirements of the Upcoming NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards”. Slides at ICMC (24-Sep-2020).

• A short initial report related to RISC-V 32-bit AES instructions appeared at SECRISC-V 2020: A Lightweight ISA Extension for AES and SM4.