Christof Paar (CASA Hub Coordinator; Founding Director, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy) and Gregor Leander (CASA PI; Faculty of Computer Science, Ruhr University Bochum) have received 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 tiny, low-power devices such as RFID tags and sensor nodes, where established ciphers like AES are too costly. Security and hardware efficiency were equally important in its design. The cipher was included in the international standard ISO/IEC 29192-2 in 2012, and the standard was reconfirmed in 2025. The paper has been cited more than 2,600 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 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 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.
Original publication: Bogdanov, A., Knudsen, L. R., Leander, G., Paar, C., Poschmann, A., Robshaw, M. J. B., Seurin, Y., Vikkelsoe, C.: PRESENT: An Ultra-Lightweight Block Cipher. CHES 2007, LNCS 4727, pp. 450–466. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74735-2_31
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