Scholarship Grant
$30,960 (9/1/00 -1 year)

Bio

Jorge Guajardo is a full-time student and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His interests include: implementation of public-key and symmetric-key cryptosystems, efficient crypto-algorithms in constrained environments and embedded processors. algorithms for elliptic and hyperelliptic curves, lattice based cryptosystems and lattice reduction algorithms, and Galois field arithmetic. In May of 1997, Jorge received his Master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from WPI. His MS thesis dealt with efficient algorithms for elliptic curve cryptosystems. The main results were published and presented at CRYPTO '97 conference. The following 13 months he spent in the IT security industry at GTE CyberTrust. Since the fall of 1998 he has been working on his PhD at the Cryptography and Information Security Laboratory at WPI. His main task has been the design and implementation of the TI crypto library SecuriTI. In addition to the Crypto '97 paper, he has published papers at the IEEE Information Security Symposium 1997, the TI DSPFest 1998, and NIST's Advanced Encryption Algorithm Conference 3 in 2000.

Current Project Description

Efficient Public-Key Algorithms for Embedded Applications

Jorge Guajardo's research will concentrate on a relatively recently proposed type of PK cryptosystems which is referred to as NTRU. NTRU was proposed by Joseph Silverman et. al. from Brown University. NTRU arithmetic is done in the ring R that consists of all truncated polynomials of degree N-1 having integer coefficients. On the other hand, the security of NTRU is based on the difficulty of finding the shortest vector in a lattice of dimension 2N. This is a very different underlying problem than the one of the better known PK algorithm families which are based on the integer factorization problem (e.g., RSA), the discrete logarithm in finite fields (e.g., Diffie-Hellman or DSA), or the elliptic curve cryptosystem (e.g.ECDSA). In the 2000/2001 academic year Jorge will systematically investigate the suitability of NTRU for embedded applications. In particular, the C54x and C62x TI DSPs and 16-bit microprocessors such as the Motorola DragonBall will be investigated. Finally, low-complexity (and, thus, low cost and low power) architectures will be studied.

Current Status
An initial C-implementation has been tested as well as a preliminary implementation of NTRU on the TI C62x DSP.