Paul Kocher to Address Researchers at CHES 2004 Conference

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — August 11, 2004 — As the use of secure smartcards and other embedded systems continues to grow, the security and tamper resistance of these devices is becoming increasingly important, according to Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist at Cryptography Research, Inc. Kocher, will discuss his vision of the challenges and solutions ahead for these systems at the upcoming Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) 2004 conference.

Kocher will present his views at an invited lecture, "From Proof to Practice: Real-World Cryptography," at CHES, the world's leading research conference in applied tamper resistance, at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, August 13 at the Boston Marriott Cambridge Hotel.

A pioneer in the field of differential power analysis (DPA) and countermeasures, Kocher will discuss the issues involved in building trustworthy cryptographic components that provide relying parties with "rational confidence" in security. "You need to have security that is both effective and that is verifiable by relying parties, since either one without the other is useless," Kocher explains.

According to Kocher, one of the most difficult unsolved research problems in security and cryptography is to find effective ways to manage the risks created by the combination of human fallibility and the increasing complexity of modern security systems. "Traditional engineering approaches simply do not produce robust security," Kocher said. "At Cryptography Research, we've been learning to manage this problem by applying risk mitigation approaches from more established industries, such as aviation and medicine." Kocher's talk will describe some of these approaches and lessons, as well as open research problems where additional work is needed.

Paul Kocher has gained an international reputation for his consulting work and academic research in cryptography. His research projects have included designing and co-authoring SSL v3.0, discovering timing attack cryptanalysis, and architecting the record-breaking DES Key Search machine, Deep Crack. At Cryptography Research, he led the team that discovered Differential Power Analysis, as well as the countermeasures for securing smart cards and other devices against these attacks.