ROBERT PRIMAS

I work as a Research Scientist at Intel Labs. Before that, I completed a Ph.D. on Side-Channel and Fault Analysis of Cryptographic Implementations at Graz University of Technology. My research interests include practical and theoretical aspects of information security. On the practical side, I work on designing and attacking implementations of (post-quantum) cryptography in hardware/software that come with protection mechanisms against physical attacks such as power/fault analysis. On the more theoretical side, I work on designing and analyzing cryptographic modes that provide high resistance against physical attacks or the formal verification of algorithmic countermeasures against physical attacks. I am a co-author of ISAP, a lightweight authenticated encryption scheme that gives strong guarantees against various kinds of physical attacks. ISAP reached the final round of the NIST standardization process for lightweight cryptography.

• Coco: Co-Design and Co-Verification of Masked Software Implementations on CPUs (pdf)
• Power Contracts: Provably Complete Power Leakage Models for Processors (pdf)
• Statistical Ineffective Fault Attacks on Masked AES with Fault Countermeasures (pdf)
• Protecting against Statistical Ineffective Fault Attacks (pdf)
• Chosen Ciphertext k-Trace Attacks on Masked CCA2 Secure Kyber (pdf)

• Optimized (protected) software implementations of Ascon (git) and ISAP (git)
• A Fast and Compact Accelerator for Ascon and Friends (git)
• Hardware reference implementations of Ascon (git, git) and ISAP (git)
• Hardware design of Ascon with protection against power analysis (git)
• Formal masking verification tool Coco (git) with (secured) Coco-IBEX core (git)

• CHES: 2025
• CASCADE: 2025
• FSE/TOSC: 2026
• FDTC: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023

• 2025: CHES, CASCADE
• 2024: CHES
• 2023: CHES, CRYPTO, CT-RSA
• 2022: CHES, SAC
• 2021: ASIACRYPT, CHES, COSADE, SAC
• 2020: CHES, CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT
• 2019: AFRICACRYPT, CHES
• 2018: AFRICACRYPT, CHES, EuroS&P

• ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
• The Computer Journal (COMJNL)
• Microprocessors and Microsystems: Embedded Hardware Design (MICPRO)
• Cryptography and Communications Discrete Structures, Boolean Functions and Sequences (CCDS)
• IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC)
• IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security (TIFS)
• IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)