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

RISC-V Cryptography Instructions

• The RISC-V Scalar Crypto specification is freely available and free for anyone to use.

• Paper at CHES 2021: “The design of scalar AES Instruction Set Extensions for RISC-V” (with B. Marshall, G. R. Newell, D. Page, C. Wolf).

• Really short slides: “RISC-V Scalar Crypto” at Real World Crypto ‘21 with B. Mashall (13-Jan-2021).

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

The RISC-V Entropy Source

• Slides: “Building and Testing a Modern TRNG/RBG: The RISC-V Entropy Source Interface” at ICMC ‘21 (03-Sep-2021).

• An updated entropy source interface paper: “Development of The RISC-V Entropy Source Interface” (with G.R. Newell and B. Marshall).

• Paper 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).

• Short report: “On Entropy and Bit Patterns of Ring Oscillator Jitter” is related to entropy evaluation of cryptographic TRNGs. Some code examples and supplementary material is available in the bitpat repo.

Testing Post-Quantum Cryptography Modules

• Slides: “PQC Modules: Requirement Specifications, Integration, and Testing” at ICMC ‘21 (02-Sep-2021).

• 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).