Section: Research Program

Symmetric Cryptography

Since the recruiting of Marine Minier in September 2016 as a Professor at the Université de Lorraine, and of Virginie Lallemand as a CNRS researcher in October 2018, a new research domain has emerged in the CARAMBA team: symmetric key cryptology. Accompanied in this adventure by non-permanent team members, we are tackling problems related to both design and analysis. A large part of our recent researches has been motivated by the Lightweight Cryptography Standardization Process of the NIST (National Institute of Standard and Technology.) that embodies a crucial challenge of the last decade: finding ciphers that are suitable for resource-constrained devices.

On a general note, the working program of CARAMBA in symmetric cryptography is defined as follows:

• Develop automatic tools based on constraint programming to help finding optimum attack parameters. The effort will be focused on the AES standard and on recent lightweight cipher proposals.

• Contribute to the security and performance analysis effort required to sort out the candidates for the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standardization Process.

• Study how to protect services execution on dedicated platforms using white-box cryptography and software obfuscation methods.