Christof Paar receives CHES Test of Time Award

The 2007 paper introducing PRESENT (a pioneering lightweight cipher) helped establish lightweight cryptography as a research field and became part of an international standard.
 

MPI-SP Founding Director Christof Paar was among the researchers presented with the Test of Time Award at this year’s Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES). The award honors their paper “PRESENT: An Ultra-Lightweight Block Cipher,” written with six co-authors and presented at CHES 2007. CHES 2026 takes place in Antalya, Türkiye, from 11 to 15 October.

PRESENT was designed for small devices with limited power and computing resources, such as electronic identification tags and sensors. Traditional encryption methods can be too demanding for these devices. PRESENT was developed to provide security while using as little energy and hardware as possible. Security and hardware efficiency were equally important in its design.

“The idea of building a cipher that is as small as possible, and not as fast as possible, was unconventional in 2007. It surprised all of us that the publication of PRESENT triggered the new research field of lightweight cryptography,” says Christof Paar.The paper has been cited more than 4000 times, and in 2010 Christof Paar, Gregor Leander and Axel Poschmann received the German IT Security Award of the Horst Görtz Foundation for PRESENT.

The cipher was included in the international standard ISO/IEC 29192-2 in 2012, and the standard was reconfirmed in 2025. The field has since reached standardization bodies worldwide: in 2025, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published a standard for lightweight cryptography for constrained devices.