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

Paper Submission Guidelines

Submitted papers must be written in English and be anonymous (with no author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, or obvious references), as we follow the double-blinded review process. All submissions must follow the original LNCS format with a page limit of 18 pages, excluding references and possible appendices and a total page limit of 24 pages. Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format. They must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal, conference, or workshop. Accepted papers will appear in Springer’s LNCS series. Every accepted paper must have at least one author registered for the workshop. 

Talk Submission Guidelines

Proposals for talks should conform to the submission format, as described above. They are not required to be full-length research papers, and they must be non-anonymous. They should present the key themes of the talk for the reviewers to assess its potential impact and quality. Talks will be judged on this basis, competitively with paper submissions, to select high-quality and/or high-impact talks and papers. Talk proposals should be clearly marked as such by having their title begin with "Talk Proposal:".

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

• Marcus Brinkmann (Ruhr University Bochum)
• Sofía Celi (Brave)
• Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup (Univesity of Klagenfurt)
• Tibor Jager (University of Wuppertal) 
• Franziskus Kiefer (Cryspen)
• Yong Li (Huawei) 
• Robert Merget (Technology Innovation Institute Abu Dhabi)
• Johannes Mittmann (Federal Office for Information Security, Germany)
• Thyla van der Merwe (Google)
• Kenneth G. Paterson (ETH Zurich)
• Jörg Schwenk (Ruhr University Bochum)
• Juraj Somorovsky (University of Paderborn)
• Douglas Stebila (University of Waterloo) 
• Filippo Valsorda (https://filippo.io)

Venue

The workshop will be co-located with ACNS 2025 (the 23nd International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security), held in Munich, Germany, on June 24, 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.