Block Course on Engineering Cryptographic Software (12th to 16th January 2026)

Prof Peter Schwabe from the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy led a block course on Engineering Cryptographic Software , from 12th to 16th January 2026. He was assisted by two of his PhD students, Amin Abdulrahman and Nguyen Hien Pham Hoang. The course was followed by both academics and students from the ICT department.

Each learner got to practice coding in the Jasmin Programming Language on the Arm Cortex-M4 on STM32Nucleo-L4R5ZI board. The course focused on considerations and optimizations for developing and deploying secure cryptographic codes to get rid of side channel attacks. Jasmin forces programmers to think in terms of assembly, while abstracting many of the operations. It also provides a Constant Time checker, to eliminate side channel attacks.

While the mood for the course was an informal one, the content presented and the assignments were intense.

Scalar Multiplication, Elliptic Curve Arithmetic, Multi-precision arithmetic and the need for constant time implementations in cryptographic implementations were also discussed. The current state of research was also addressed. 

Learners got the chance to work on assignments implementing the ChaCha20 stream cypher, which is defined the IETF’s RFC8439, as well as the Elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman. Learners had to produce both naïve and optimized implementations of the codes.

Prof Schwabe also exposed students to potential exchanges that they can have with his group and how to engage with the cryptography community, for example, by applying for student stipends to attend the Real World Crypto Symposium.

Learners of the course can still have access to the boards to keep working on the assignments and relevant problems in the domain.