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.

Since January 2023, I have been a part-time Professor of Practice (työelämäprofessori, tietoturva) at Tampere University, associated with the Network and Information Security Group (NISEC).

PQCrypto 2024

I’m the Program Co-Chair (with Daniel Smith-Tone) of PQCrypto 2024, which will be held at the University of Oxford Mathematical Institute on June 12-14, 2024. We will post more details closer to the event.

Current Research (2020-)

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.
Posting on pqc-forum: OFFICIAL COMMENT: ALTEQ (July 18, 2023) Here’s some code: ALTEQ 1.0 Implementation and forgery demo.
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.” Joint work 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.” Joint work 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.” Joint work 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.
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.