Silicon Salon 3 Call for Contributions

The Silicon Salon is Back for the New Year!

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Blockchain Commons will be facilitating Silicon Salon 3 in mid-January, tentatively on January 18th. This series of virtual Silicon Salons is intended to bring together digital wallet developers, semiconductor manufacturers, and academics. Their objective: to ensure that the next generation of cryptographic semiconductors meets everyone’s needs, advancing the entire cryptography industry. There is a gap between wallet requirements and semiconductor development, between academic research and real-world practice; we want to bridge it.

We will bring together semiconductor developers, cryptographers, and other experts present, with presentations focused on new silicon-logic-based cryptographic functionality & leveraging opportunities for semiconductor acceleration, such as Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and ZK-proofs.

The field of MPC (Multi-Party Computation) for security applications has been an area of energetic academic research since first introduced by Andrew Yao in 1986. More recently, increases in computation capability and improvement in the efficiency of algorithms have enabled MPC to move from the theoretical to the practical. Varous MPC-TSS (MPC-Threshold Signature System) approaches offer significant benefits in security, robustness, and recovery versus traditional “single private key” systems. However, practical MPC is still in its infancy and is rapidly evolving, which introduces challenges in providing silicon support for the future of cryptography.

Some presentations lined up so far are:

• Toward a More Open Secure Element Chip (bunnie studios). What are the elements that make a semiconductor more or less “open”? How do you maintain openness in a proprietary ecosystem, and is there a purpose to secrecy in security?
• Silicon & MPC (Cramium). In this talk Cramium will overview silicon architecture approaches to addressing concerns of security, performance and efficiency, economic concerns, and flexibility to accommodate future improvements. We will overview some facets of MPC-based distributed key management that receive little academic attention, but are important in a practical context.
• A Fast Large-Integer Extended GCD Algorithm and Hardware Design for Verifiable Delay Functions and Modular Inversion (Kavya Sreedhar). This presentation will cover work on developing a large-integer extended GCD (XGCD) algorithm and hardware design, published in CHES2022. It uses carry-save arithmetic and conducts a design space exploration over XGCD algorithms and application requirements to design an accelerator that supports fast average and constant-time evaluation and is easily extensible for polynomial XGCD.

If you are interested in making a presentation at Silicon Salon 3, please contact us with a proposal. Include the following:

1. The title.
2. A summary of what your presentation will be about.
3. A summary of how that relates to silicon-logic-based cryptographic acceleration & new functionality and/or the general topic of integrating cryptography into new semiconductors. Note that this can be a discussion of capabilities from the point of view of a semiconductor manufacturer, of needs from a wallet manufacturer, or other discussions from someone in the broader decentralized community.
4. The name of the presenter(s).
5. A description of who they are and how they or their company have the expertise, capability, or reach to benefit the Silicon Salon conversation.

Final presentations should be about five minutes long, supported by a slide deck or some sort, which you will present in our Zoom salon on the date of the salon.

Please note the following deadlines for Silicon Salon 3 proposals and contributions:

• December 23 - Final date for submission of proposals.
• January 4 — Blockchain Commons selection of proposals.
• January 11 — Submission of draft slidedecks to Blockchain Commons for any comments.
• January 16 — Submission of final slidedecks to Blockchain Commons for inclusion in post-event web pages.
• January 18 — Presentation at Silicon Salon 3.
• January 25 — Blockchain Commons finalization of web site release.

Also please note that the January 18th date is tentative. We are checking with likely participants for conflicts, and ensuring that the holidays won’t cause too much conflict. If it moves, then the January deadlines will move accordingly.

Thank you for your interest in Silicon Salon 3 and the future of semiconductor integration with cryptography! If you have any questions or want more information, please email us at team@blockchaincommons.com.

Even if you do not want to present, please Save the Date of January 18th, 2023, so that you can participate in the conversation. We’ll make an announcement as soon as we’ve finalized the date and have an Eventbrite page availabale for signups.

See https://www.siliconsalon.info/ for our salons to date. Silicon Salon 3 will continue this discussion.

Thank you to our sustaining sponsors who make Silicon Salon possible: Bitmark, Chia, Cramium Labs (a subsidiary of CrossBar), Foundation, Proxy, and Unchained Capitol. We are also seeking additional sponsors. Mail us at team@blockchaincommons.com or become a sponsor on GitHub and let us know it’s to support the Silicon Salons!

Christopher Allen Blockchain Commons