This inaugural workshop on Secure Protocol Implementations in the Quantum Era (SPIQE) will focus on addressing critical challenges of transitioning security protocols to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). As conventional cryptographic algorithms increasingly face threats from quantum computing, the need to migrate to PQC presents both significant technical and practical obstacles. This workshop will serve as a platform for researchers and practitioners to address these challenges, focusing on the implementation, analysis, and deployment of post-quantum secure protocols.

The workshop aims to foster collaboration between academia and industry, bringing together experts in cryptography, software engineering, protocol design, and cybersecurity. Topics covered include formal verification of cryptographic code, post-quantum migration strategies, hybrid protocol implementations, and automated techniques for identifying vulnerabilities.

To encourage broad participation and a diverse range of contributions, the workshop solicits both full papers and talks. By alleviating the requirement of preparing a paper in order to share valuable insights and results, we hope to attract high-quality submissions from researchers focused on in-depth studies, as well as industry professionals and practitioners who can share insights and case studies from real-world implementations.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions (papers and talks) must be anonymous, with no author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, or obvious references. Each submission must begin with a title, short abstract, and a list of keywords. The introduction should summarize the contributions of the paper or talk at a level appropriate for a non-specialist reader. All submissions must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal, conference, or workshop.

Paper Submission Guidelines

Papers must be submitted in PDF format, following the unmodified LNCS format (accessible on the Springer LCNS author guidelines webpage) and typeset using the corresponding LaTeX class file. They must fit within a page limit of 20 pages, including title and abstract, figures, etc., but excluding references. Optionally, any amount of clearly marked supplementary material may be supplied, following the main body of the paper; however, reviewers are not required to read or review any supplementary material, and submissions are expected to be intelligible without it. Submissions not meeting these guidelines risk rejection without consideration of their merits. To accommodate for changes requested in reviews, the page limit for the camera-ready proceedings versions is 30 pages, including references and appendices.

Talk Submission Guidelines

Proposals for talks should conform to the submission format, as described above (title, abstract, keywords, and introduction), presenting the key themes of the talk, in order for the reviewers to make an assessment on its potential impact and quality. Talks will be judged on this basis, competitively with paper submissions, with the aim to select high-quality and/or high-impact talks and papers.   

List of Relevant Topics

• Formal verification of code, including post-quantum cryptographic algorithms
• Security models and formal analysis for PQC-based protocols
• Post-quantum migration strategies for security protocols
• Software engineering approaches to transform classical protocol specifications into quantum-resistant implementations
• Hardware implementations of post-quantum KEMs and signature schemes (e.g., hardware acceleration, hardware instruction sets for PQC, assembly optimizations)
• Protection against side-channel and fault attacks in classical and post-quantum cryptographic implementations
• Concrete benchmarking and analysis of classical attacks on post-quantum cryptographic schemes
• Quantum cryptanalysis and its implications for secure protocol designs and implementations
• Automated techniques for identifying vulnerabilities in protocol implementations (e.g., fuzzing, testing, state learning, symbolic execution)
• LangSec approaches for improving the robustness of protocol specifications and implementations
• Model-based testing of classical and post-quantum protocol implementations
• Hybrid classical-post-quantum security protocol implementations and their analyses
• Large-scale analyses of post-quantum protocol deployments
• Post-quantum key management and PKIs
• Cryptographic agility in the deployment and migration to post-quantum cryptographic algorithms
• Lessons learned from recent attacks on post-quantum implementations
• Standardization of post-quantum algorithms: current state and challenges

Committees

Program Chairs

• Kenneth G. Paterson (ETH Zurich)
• Juraj Somorovsky (University of Paderborn)

Program Committee

• TBC

Venue

The workshop will be co-located with ACNS 2025 (the 23nd International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security), held in Munich, Germany, between 23-26 June 2025.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be sent by email to the Workshop Program Chairs. All other questions should be directed by email to the Workshop Organizer.