Call for Contributions
	
  SHARCS -- Special-Purpose Hardware for Attacking Cryptographic Systems
                         www.sharcs.org

			April 03 -04, 2006, Cologne 


SHARCS'06 is the second workshop dedicated to the challenging subject
of special-purpose cryptanalytical machines. The first SHARCS workshop
took place 2005 in Paris and attracted 120 participants from industry,
academia and government organization. In the upcoming workshop we
intend to include more contributed talks and therefore encourage
submissions to the areas listed below.

Much of the earlier work on special-purpose hardware was done on key
searches for symmetric-key algorithms, with a particular emphasis on
attacks against DES. More recently there has been interest in hardware
architectures for sieving methods for attacking the RSA
scheme. However, it seems that much work remains to be done including,
for instance, special purpose hardware crackers for:

   * index calculus algorithms
   * elliptic curve based schemes
   * lattice based schemes
   * specific block and stream ciphers   

In addition to algorithmic issues, it is also the workshop's goal to make
advances on implementational issues such as:

   * optical devices for cryptanalysis
   * analog computers for cryptanalysis
   * FPGAs for cryptanalysis
   * clusters of standard computers for cryptanalysis
   * routing protocols and other low-level tools

The ultimate objective of SHARCS is to determine whether special
purpose hardware poses a real threat for today's cryptographic
algorithms, and whether there are advantages over software-based
attacks. Since this is an intrinsically interdisciplinary subject, it
is hoped that the workshop can bring together researchers with
different backgrounds for discussing and advancing this exciting
field.

The workshop will consist of invited keynote presentations and some
contributed presentations. We welcome submissions of extended
abstracts (at least 3 pages.) We would like to stress that we do *not*
aim at receiving contributions on side channel attacks. Furthermore,
at this point we exclude quantum cryptologic devices.  Theoretical
papers analyzing the feasibility and costs of attacks using
specialized hardware are, however, very much welcomed.

For more information on the workshop visit: www.sharcs.org
                        
The workshop is organized by ECRYPT, the European Network of
Excellence in Cryptography (www.ecrypt.eu.org). The workshop is an
activity of ECRYPT's VAMPIRE - Virtual Application and Implementation
Research Lab, (www.rub.de/itsc/tanja/vampire).

There will be no formal proceedings, but a handout with abstracts will
be provided to all participants. (This avoids submissions to SHARCS
from conflicting with submissions to forthcoming conferences with
proceedings).

Important dates:
	February 17, 2006:    submission of abstracts
	March 06, 2006:       notification of acceptance or rejection
	March 20, 2006:       revised version of accepted papers
	April 03 & 04, 2006:  SHARCS workshop

The submission should start with a title, a list of the authors
together with their affiliations and a short abstract describing the
content of the paper. This should be followed by an extended abstract
of at least 3 and at most 20 pages including appendices. The authors
of accepted papers must guarantee to present their paper at the
workshop.


To submit send your contribution to

      submit@sharcs.org

no later than February 17, 2006, in ps or pdf format. You should 
receive an acknowledgment of submission no later than one day 
after submission.


Program Committee: 

	* Daniel J. Bernstein (University of Illinois at Chicago)
	* Tanja Lange (Technical University of Denmark)			
	* Arjen Lenstra	(Lucent Technologies/Eindhoven Technical University)
	* Christof Paar	(Ruhr-University Bochum)   
	* Eran Tromer (Weizmann Institute of Science)