Paper by Aysu and Becchi Chosen as Best Paper at DATE Conference

A paper outlining a hardware solution to then next generation of cryptographic solutions by Aydin Aysu and Michela Becchi was chosen as Best Paper at the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference

At this year’s Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE), a paper co-authored by Aydin Aysu, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and Michela Becchi, an associate professor of ECE was selected for a DATE Best Paper Award.

The paper, A Flexible and Scalable NTT Hardware: Applications from Homomorphically Encrypted Deep Learning to Post-Quantum Cryptography, sets the stage for the next generation of powerful cryptographic hardware.

The Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) enables faster polynomial multiplication and is becoming a fundamental aspect of next-generation cryptographic systems. NTT hardware designs have two prevalent structural and hardware problems related to design-time flexibility, which the paper seeks to address with hardware acceleration that shows great improvements to the prior software and synthesis solutions—paving the way for next-generation cryptographic hardware solutions.

Each year the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference presents awards to the authors of the best papers following peer selection.

“The best application paper has been awarded to one paper out of 748 submissions,” commented Aysu. “The paper proposes a design automation technique for automatic and efficient hardware implementation of a critical component used in post-quantum secure cryptography protocols and homomorphic encryption. We acknowledge NSF CRII Award #1850373 for making this research possible.”

The DATE conference, intended to be hosted in Grenoble, France, was shifted successfully to a virtual platform due to the global impacts for the COVID-19 pandemic.