Antoon Purnal (Toon)

Antoon Purnal (Toon)

Cryptography Security Analyst at PQShield

About me

My interests include microarchitectural attacks and defenses, as well as efficient and secure cryptographic implementations. I obtained my PhD degree, entitled “Cache Side-Channel Attacks on Existing and Emerging Computing Platforms”, at the COSIC group at KU Leuven in June 2023. During the summer of 2022, I interned at Intel Labs.

In August 2023, I joined PQShield as a Cryptography Security Analyst.

Selected Publications

Cache Side-Channel Attacks on Existing and Emerging Computing Platforms
Antoon Purnal
PhD Dissertation Summa Cum Laude (top 5% of Engineering Faculty)

SpectrEM: Exploiting Electromagnetic Emanations During Transient Execution
Jesse De Meulemeester, Antoon Purnal, Lennert Wouters, Arthur Beckers, Ingrid Verbauwhede
USENIX Security '23

ShowTime: Amplifying Arbitrary CPU Timing Side Channels
Antoon Purnal, Marton Bognar, Frank Piessens, Ingrid Verbauwhede
AsiaCCS '23

Scatter and Split Securely: Defeating Cache Contention and Occupancy Attacks
Lukas Giner, Stefan Steinegger, Antoon Purnal, Maria Eichlseder, Thomas Unterluggauer, Stefan Mangard, and Daniel Gruss
S&P '23

Double Trouble: Combined Heterogeneous Attacks on Non-inclusive Cache Hierarchies
Antoon Purnal, Furkan Turan, Ingrid Verbauwhede
USENIX Security '22

Prime+Scope: Overcoming the Observer Effect for High-Precision Cache Contention Attacks
Antoon Purnal, Furkan Turan, Ingrid Verbauwhede
CCS '21

Systematic Analysis of Randomization-based Protected Cache Architectures
Antoon Purnal, Lukas Giner, Daniel Gruss, Ingrid Verbauwhede
S&P '21

Forkcipher: a new primitive for authenticated encryption of very short messages
Elena Andreeva, Virginie Lallemand, Antoon Purnal, Reza Reyhanitabar, Arnab Roy, Damian Vizár
ASIACRYPT '19

Trade-offs in protecting Keccak against combined side-channel and fault attacks
Antoon Purnal, Victor Arribas, Lauren De Meyer
COSADE '19 OneSpan MSc Thesis Award


Teaching & Service

Peer review

  • TCHES 2024
  • External: USENIX Security 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019
  • External: COSADE 2022
  • External: IEEE EuroS&P 2021
  • External: HOST 2020
  • External: ESSCIRC 2019

Previous

  • Hardware Security: main teaching assistant
  • Supervision of several MSc thesis students
  • Ombudsperson for the MSc in Electrical Engineering at KU Leuven
  • Applied Algebra: teaching assistant
  • Student TA for Electromagnetic Waves (2017-2018), Problem Solving & Design (2017) and Calculus I and III (2017)