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. I work on various things but I’m mainly responsible for cryptographic hardware IP and the PQSoC Post-Quantum Secure Element.

Most Recent Public Research

• AES and SM4 Instruction Set Extension for RISC-V. My short initial report appeared at SECRISC-V 2020: “A Lightweight ISA Extension for AES and SM4”. A much more comprehesive report with will appear at CHES 2021: “The design of scalar AES Instruction Set Extensions for RISC-V” (with B. Marshall, G. R. Newell, D. Page, C. Wolf). Slides from a short “RISC-V Scalar Crypto” talk at Real World Crypto (13-Jan-2021).

• rvkrypto-fips is a github repo for RISC-V Crypto Extension higher-level algorithm wests.

• RISC-V On-Chip Random Number Generators. I worked with the RISC-V CETG also to map out the requirements for physical random sources in the instruction set. First paper from this work came out at ASHES 2020: “Building a Modern TRNG: An Entropy Source Interface for RISC-V” (with G.R. Newell and B. Marshall). Slides from a talk I gave at ASHES (13-Nov-2020).

• On Entropy and Bit Patterns of Ring Oscillator Jitter is a new preprint related to entropy evaluation of cryptographic TRNGs. Some code examples and supplementary material is available in the bitpat repo.

• 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”. Slides from a talk I gave at ICMC (24-Sep-2020).