Security is a crucial issue in many of today's communication and computer applications that are often used over open networks and among a wide spectrum of users including banks, businesses and individuals. The use of open networks, however, poses a variety of security threats for authentication, data integrity, confidentiality, etc. Security breeches can cause both short- and  long-term damages to the users' confidence in the underlying infrastructure and it is quite important to ensure an adequate level of security in many communication and computer applications.

In order to provide security for communications and computers, various cryptographic schemes can be used. Many of these schemes are computationally intense and require  abstract type of computations, e.g., point addition on elliptic curves, and deal with very large operands. Such computations are not well supported by most main stream processors, and require special representations, algorithms and hardware architectures. For practical applications, these algorithms and architectures are to meet performance requirements under various constraints, such as limited area, narrow bandwidth, and low power. More importantly, they need to operate in a way so that they do not leak information related to the secret key of the cryptosystem through various side channels, such as power consumption signals, electromagnetic emanations, and erroneous outputs caused by faults induced deliberately by a malicious attacker.

An important goal of our research is to investigate various aspects of cryptographic computations that extent from digital signature generation by modular exponentiation or elliptic curve scalar multiplication to basic field arithmetic, and are at the heart of many security schemes used in communications and computers. To this end, we have been working to develop high performance cryptosystems using novel computing algorithms and architectures that are not only efficient but also fault-tolerant and secure against side channel attacks. Our work also includes investigation of new algorithms and hardware architectures that can meet various constraints, such as space--memory and/or silicon, time, reliability, etc.