4^th Workshop on Nano Security: From Nano-Electronics to Secure Systems (NanoSec’26)

Workshop speakers were free to provide materials (slides or papers) for publications. The provided materials are available from the list below.

20  – 22 April 2026, Verona, Italy, co-located with Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference

We regret to inform that our foreseen keynote speaker Professor Massimo Alioto was forced to cancel his participation due to health reasons. We are wishing Professor Alioto swift recovery.

We are pleased to announce that Professor Francesco Regazzoni, University of Amsterdam and USI Lugano, has kindly agreed to join us as keynote speaker. We are grateful for Francesco’s willingness to step in and look forward to his keynote entitled “(Re-)Thinking Hardware Security in the Nanoscale Age”.

Today’s societies critically depend on electronic systems. Security of such systems are facing completely new challenges due to the ongoing transition to radically new types of nano-electronic devices, such as memristors, spintronics, or carbon nanotubes. The use of such emerging nano-technologies is inevitable to address the essential needs related to energy efficiency, computing power and performance. Therefore, the entire industry are switching to emerging nano-electronics alongside scaled CMOS technologies in heterogeneous integrated systems. These technologies come with new properties and also facilitate the development of radically different computer architectures.

The fourth edition of the NanoSec workshop will bring together researchers from hardware-oriented security and from emerging hardware technology. It will explore the potential of new technologies and architectures to provide new opportunities for achieving security targets, but it will also raise questions about their vulnerabilities to new types of hardware-oriented attacks. The workshop is based on a Priority Program https://spp-nanosecurity.uni-stuttgart.de/ funded since 2019 by the German DFG, and will be open to members and non-members of that Priority Program alike.

The workshop invites submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Nano-electronic security primitives, such as physical unclonable functions, random number generators, cryptographic blocks, reconfigurable nano-fabrics, or obfuscation/camouflaging structures
• Integration of secure primitives into larger systems, protocols and architectures, translating security guarantees defined and validated for lower-level primitives in higher-order, system- and architecture-level security properties
• Attacks against systems with nano-electronic components, including side-channel analysis, fault injection, microarchitectural covert channels, and countermeasures against such attacks

This year, the workshop will feature a Special Session on Secure Compute-in-Memory Architectures, organized by Prof. Mahdi Fazeli  (Halmstad University) and Prof. Ahmad Patooghy (North Caroline A&T University)

A submission can describe a novel scientific result, provide a position statement about a new and relevant problem, or report a case study on practical experiences with a technique from the list above. The submissions should not be formally published in the past. The workshop will have no formal proceedings, so authors will be free to resubmit their work to conferences or journals. Accepted papers can, at the discretion and with an approval of their authors, be published on the workshop’s website. You will be able to indicate during submission whether you are submitting to the regular program or to the Special Session on Secure Compute-in-Memory Architectures.

Submissions in form of full 6-page papers or 1-2 page extended abstracts (in IEEE double-column format, either A4 or US Letter) should be submitted through EasyChair:

Submission deadline: February 2, 2026
Acceptance notification: February 16, 2026

PDF file for publishing on the workshop’s website (optional): March 10, 2026

Workshop: April 20 – 22, 2026 (exact day and time slot to be announced soon)

Registration:
This workshop is co-located with the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and will use its registration facilities. Please register through the DATE website:

Ilia Polian, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Nan Du, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany
Yunsi Fey, Northeaster University, Boston, USA
Shahar Kvatinsky, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Fareena Saqib, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA

The workshop is organized by the Priority Program Nano Security
https://spp-nanosecurity.uni-stuttgart.de/