IACR CHES 2008, Preface

These are the proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES), held in Washington D.C., United States, August 10-13, 2008. This workshop was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR).

The CHES 2008 workshop attracted 107 submissions from 23 countries, of which the program committee selected 27 papers for publication. The review process followed strict standards: each paper received at least four reviews; members of the program committee were restricted to submitting at most two papers. The 42 Program committee members from 13 countries were selected carefully to ensure that different fields, such as hardware and software implementations, active and passive implementation attacks, cryptanalysis and cryptography including random number generation, embedded systems, and trusted computing were well represented and a balance between academia and industry was achieved. Counting all program committee members, external reviewers, and the program co-chairs, we had 158 people contributing to the review process. We would like to thank all program committee members and external reviewers for their contribution to the review process.

In just 10 years, the CHES workshop has grown to become the flagship event in its area, attracting high-profile papers and attendees from academia and industry. This excellence shows in the quality of contributed papers and invited talks. In cooperation with the CHES Steering Committee, the program committee awarded the CHES 2008 Best Paper Award to two contributions: `Attack and Improvement of a Secure S-box Calculation Based on the Fourier Transform' by Jean-Sébastien Coron, Christophe Giraud, Emmanuel Prouff and Matthieu Rivain, and 'Time-Area Optimized Public-Key Engines: MQ-Cryptosystems as Replacement for Elliptic Curves?' by Andrey Bogdanov, Thomas Eisenbarth, Andy Rupp and Christopher Wolf. The purpose of the award is to formally acknowledge excellence in research. We would like to congratulate the authors of these two papers. In addition to presentations of peer reviewed papers there were excellent invited presentations. At the time of compiling the proceedings, an invited talk by Prof Adi Shamir on 'RSA: Past, Present and Future', and an invited talk by Ernie Brickell from Intel on 'A Vision for Platform Security' had been confirmed.

In order to celebrate the 10th anniversary of CHES, the workshop programme included a tour of the National Cryptologic Museum in Fort Mead and a talk by Christof Paar and çetin Kaya Koç on history of CHES. In addition there was a rump session and a panel discussion. Special thanks for making these possible and taking care of the local organisation, go to the General Co-Chairs Kris Gaj and Jens-Peter Kaps (both from George Mason University). We are also greatly indebted to the CHES Steering Committee for their guidance and support throughout the process of putting this program together. The peer review process, and the production of these proceedings were greatly facilitated by the IACR Webreview System. Shai Halevi (IBM) receives our sincere gratitude for providing and maintaining this software, and for always being prepared to help.

We would also like to acknowledge and thank our sponsors, many of whom have generously supported the workshop over the years. At the time of writing these proceedings a number of companies were confirmed as sponsors: Cryptography Research Inc., CygnaCom Solutions, escrypt GmbH, IBM Research, Oberthur Technologies, Philips Intrinsic-ID, Research Center of Information Security (RCIS) Japan, and Thomson R&D France.

Finally, we would like to thank all the researchers and authors from all over the world who submitted their work to the CHES 2008 conference and whose efforts creates the vibrant field of research that CHES is proud to represent.