AUK Student to Present Paper at International Conference

AUK Computer Engineering Student, Fatma Qatan, has a full paper accepted for publication at the International Conference on Computer Systems and Industrial Informatics (ICCSII), American University of Sharjah, UAE, December 18-20, 2012. The ICCSII focuses on the state of the art in computing, networking, and software development and their synergetic integration to explore theoretical engineering venues and solve practical industrial problems.

Qatan's paper is titled "High-speed KATAN Ciphers on-a-Chip", and was coauthored by her supervisor from AUK - Dr. Issam Damaj, an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering and the department chair. The accepted paper presents the analysis and evaluation of cheap and relatively fast hardware implementations of the KATAN family of block ciphers. The paper proposed a pipelined decomposition of KATAN ciphers. VHDL under Altera Quartus is used in conjunction with ModelSim to implement and analyze the hardware designs. The developed designs are mapped onto high-performance Field Programmable Gate Arrays, namely Stratix II and IV from Altera. The findings are compared with similar hardware implementations and C software versions of the algorithms. The performance analysis of the C implementations is done using Intel Vtune Amplifier running on a Dell precision T7500 machine with its dual quad-core Xeon processor and 24 GB of RAM. The obtained results show better performance when compared with existing hardware and software implementations.

Qatan's achievement comes after her participation last year in an undergraduate conference with a published abstract and a poster presentation. She is expected to travel to present her paper in the conference in UAE this coming December. For more information on the conference please visit the website at : www.aus.edu/info/200169/college_of_engineering/460/iccsii12/1#.ULmz0oOsiSo

Released by the Office of Public Affairs on the 6th December 2012