CHES Challenge
Call for CHES Challenge Organisers
Since 2015, a crypto engineering challenge is organised every year in cooperation with CHES. Former editions have focused on practical side-channel attacks, design of countermeasures, deep learning-based attacks, white-box cryptography, and hardware security.
See for instance:
- https://smaesh-challenge.simple-crypto.org/
- https://whibox.io/contests/
- https://hackatevent.org/hackches25/
- https://ctf.spook.dev/
We welcome any proposals of challenge organisation for CHES 2026.
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.
Proposing a Challenge
If you wish to propose a challenge, please send your proposal to Matthieu Rivain ([email protected]) by 7 April 2026.
Feel free to contact Matthieu ahead of time for any question or to notify your proposal.
