Meziane, R&D Engineer, Evaluate Business Line – Paris, France
Secure-IC’s people portraits
Introduce yourself
My name is Meziane and I work as a R&D Engineer at Secure-IC, in the Evaluate Business Line. I joined Secure-IC after graduating in Mathematics, Computer Sciences and Cryptology (master’s degree) from Paris Diderot University.
What are the missions of your team at Secure-IC?
In Evaluate Business Line, our mission is to ensure and evaluate the overall security of any embedded system / cryptographic device and to provide mitigation measures, mainly against side-channel attacks, fault injection attacks, and cyber-attacks. We are also in charge of producing and updating automated tools in our product catalog such as CatalyzrTM, VirtualyzrTM and AnalyzrTM, to achieve this goal. We also offer training courses to enable our customers to build their own secure devices and to learn how to evaluate and mitigate their own systems.
What is the most challenging project you took part in?
One of the most challenging projects I took part in, was the evaluation of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms against side-channel and cache attacks. Indeed, little focused research has been carried out on this type of evaluation on modern cryptography implementation like PQC. Moreover, the work done in this specific area is still in the standardization phase. The main challenge was that the state of the art on the evaluation of PQC algorithms was not rich. We had to explore, think outside of the box and be innovative in our analysis approach. In the end, we succeeded in completing this project and one of our evaluation methods was even published in a scientific paper.
What’s next for you at Secure-IC?
I want to be at the top in other security fields, in addition to performing penetration testing, physical and cyber-attacks. I also want to continue to educate myself in order to always be up-to-date in modern physical attacks and protections which include AI and machine learning for instance. Finally, my motivation lies in the possibility of participating in even more innovative projects!
What is your best memory since you joined Secure-IC?
There are tons of anecdotes I have shared with my co-workers, most of them after trainings, when, what little stress we had was always relieved with laughter and jokes. Those are great times and I really enjoy this feeling of sticking together through the challenging times and enjoying the fruits of our labor together.