Mid-August I gave an invited talk at WAC 2020 preceeding Crypto 2020, here is a brief summary and a link to the recording on YouTube. The Workshop on Attacks in Cryptography is a little gem that has run a few times now, preceeding Crypto 2020 (arguably the crypto communities premier event). Contributions there focus on offensive aspects of (applied) crypto and therefore touch on my area of interest: the security of crypto implementations in the presence of side channel (and fault) adversaries. In my talk I was reflecting on the gap that exists between assumption made to proof some schemes secure in the presence of leakage, and the reality of implementing those schemes of off the shelve processors. This ties in with my biggest ongoing research effort (the research related to the ERC funded SEAL project), and the results around leakage modelling that we have achieved in there. The short summary w.r.t. the gap is: the gap is considerable, IMHO closing the gap isn’t necessarily desirable (IMHO closing the gap equates to working in the leakage resilient setting as per Dziembowski and Pietrzak), but creating tools/methodology to bridge the gap would be useful.

I had pre-recorded the talk and you can watch it here.