August 12, 2008 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Comodo (http://www.comodo.com), a global leader in Identity and Trust Assurance Management solutions, has announced that Dr Colin Walter, Head of Cryptography at Comodo's Digital Trust Research Lab, will be presenting at the upcoming Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware & Embedded Systems 2008 in Washington, DC from August 10 to 13 (http://www.chesworkshop.org). Dr Walter's speech, Recovering Secret Keys from Weak Side Channel Traces of Differing Lengths, focuses on the combined effect of standard software countermeasures in order to assess the minimum requirements for hardware countermeasures which lead to cryptographic key security.
In the field of cryptography, side channel attacks are the exploitation of weaknesses in physical devices used to deploy cryptographic systems allowing the attacker to decrypt sensitive data, such as private keys. For example, minute variations in timing, power, and electro-magnetic radiation can be used to reconstruct the secret keys used by a smartcard or cryptographic token when performing authentication.
In his paper, Dr. Walter studies combined effect of several software countermeasures in order to assess the minimum requirements for the hardware. This leads to security for the secret key.
Dr. Colin Walter is the Head of Cryptography at Comodo CA and Chairman of Peripherals Working Group - Trusted Computing Group and a member of the Steering Committee for Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems. He has achieved international recognition in the design of hardware and algorithms for the implementation of RSA cryptography. A senior member of the IEEE, Colin is most well-known to the international community for his long term research into Montgomery modular multiplication. A selection of his papers are available on the Comodo website at http://www.comodo.com/research/crypto/publications.html.
