Since 2015, a crypto-engineering challenge is organized every year in cooperation with CHES.
Call for CHES Challenge Organizers
Former editions have focused on
practical side-channel attacks,
design of countermeasures,
deep learning-based attacks,
white-box cryptography,
and hardware security.
We welcome any proposals of challenge organisation for CHES 2024.
Guidelines for Challenge Proposals
A challenge proposal should comply to the following:
The scope of the challenge should be related to CHES topics (cryptographic implementations, embedded systems, software security, hardware security, cryptographic engineering, …) — see CHES call for papers for an extensive list.
The target audience should be researchers and engineers in cryptography. Winning the challenge should (at least) require a good knowledge of the related state of the art.
The organising team should include senior members with experience in the CHES community (author and/or program committee member in previous editions of CHES).
The typical schedule for the challenge is a start around April / May and an end before the CHES conference (winners are announced during the challenge ceremony at CHES).
A challenge proposal should include:
a description of the challenge (goal, rules, proposed puzzles in case of CTF-like),
the proposed schedule for the challenge,
a presentation of the organising team.
Organisers' Responsibilities
In case of accepted proposal, the challenge organisers are responsible for:
writing a comprehensive set of rules,
preparing the challenge announcement (the target is March-April depending on the challenge schedule),
setting up the challenge website / server,
running the challenge according to the rules and schedule (and providing support to participants),
finding prizes (budget is provided by the CHES general chairs),
organising the challenge ceremony at CHES: it usually occurs during the rump session, with a presentation of the challenge from the organisers (rules, results, winners etc.) and the handing over of the prizes to the winners.
This last bullet notably implies that a member of the organisation team should attend to CHES.
One free registration as well as limited support for travelling will be covered by the CHES general chairs for this purpose.