Call for Papers: Special Issue on Systems for Cryptographic Computing

Submission Due: 1 March 2027

Publication: September/October 2027

Cryptographic computing, including fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), secure multiparty computation (MPC), and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), is increasingly becoming a practical and critical aspect of computing. Together, they enable computation over protected data, verifiable execution, privacy-preserving analytics, and even quantum-resistant security. These techniques have seen a surge of interest and advancement over the past decade thanks to research contributions spanning algorithms, software, and hardware. Yet, deployment remains costly: cryptographic workloads can still impose orders-of-magnitude overheads in computation, storage, communication, and energy.

These workloads differ from conventional applications. Many operate over large finite fields and polynomial rings; rely on number-theoretic transforms (NTTs), modular arithmetic, multiscalar multiplication, and hashing. These are each expensive to compute. Moreover, the level of complexity and slowdown of these workloads demands full system consideration, rather than piecewise optimization. Interactions between algorithms, compilers, runtimes, operating systems, memory and storage hierarchies, communication, and hardware must all be optimized together to alleviate the remaining performance overhead. Recent research has proposed hardware accelerators for FHE, ZKP proving, and MPC, have considered near-data-processing (NDP) and processing-in-memory (PIM), ISA extensions, and compiler optimizations, and high-performance GPU implementations.

This IEEE Micro Special Issue aims to bridge the cryptography and computer architecture communities and bring together academic researchers and industrial practitioners working across the full stack of cryptographic computing. We invite original contributions on systems that execute cryptographic computing, including system-level, architectural, microarchitectural, compiler, runtime, and algorithm–system co-design. We encourage work that connects protocol design to real implementation constraints, develops shared methodologies and benchmarks, reports rigorous quantitative evaluation, and demonstrates how new systems make previously impractical applications deployable. Visionary perspectives, production experiences, and carefully supported negative results are also welcome when they yield broadly useful insights.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Algorithms and Protocol–System Co-Design: Algorithms, protocol variants, arithmetic representations, approximation techniques, and parameter selection for FHE, ZKPs, MPC, and related workloads, designed with concrete system, communication, and hardware costs in mind.
• Programming Models, Languages, and Compilers: Domain-specific languages, intermediate representations, graph and circuit compilers, automatic kernel generation, scheduling, memory planning, vectorization, fusion, compiler and runtime support, verification, and correctness-aware compilation for cryptographic workloads.
• Runtime Systems and Operating Systems: Runtimes, task graphs, resource management, heterogeneous scheduling, memory allocation, fault recovery, and OS support for cryptographic computations.
• Processors, Accelerators, and Microarchitecture: CPUs, vector processors, GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, CGRAs, systolic and spatial architectures, reconfigurable systems, ISA extensions for cryptographic computing. 
• GPU and Heterogeneous Computing: Efficient mappings to GPUs and other massively parallel platforms, kernel optimization and memory management, multi-GPU execution, CPU-GPU collaboration, and portability.
• Memory Systems, Storage, and Data Movement: Cache and scratchpad organizations, high-bandwidth and disaggregated memory, data-movement and capacity challenges, near-data and processing-in-memory, compression, and recomputation.
• Benchmarking, Modeling, and Methodology: Representative benchmarks and datasets, workload characterization, benchmark suites, simulators and simulation infrastructure, analytical and learned cost models, profiling and debugging tools, reproducibility infrastructure, standardized metrics, and fair cross-platform or cross-protocol evaluation.
• Deployment Experiences and Case Studies: Production systems, open-source software stacks, commercial accelerators, datacenter and edge deployments, post-quantum migration and lessons learned from deployed systems, lessons from prior approaches, and real-world applications with measured end-to-end impact.
• Emerging Platforms and Technologies: Chiplets, advanced packaging, photonic or optical communication, emerging memories, processing-in-memory, composable systems, and other technologies that can reshape the cost and deployment model of cryptographic computing.

Scope note. Submissions should make a clear systems, architecture, or implementation contribution and quantitatively evaluate its impact. Purely cryptographic constructions without substantial computing-systems insight are outside the intended scope; new cryptographic methods are welcome when they are developed or evaluated in close connection with implementation, deployment, or full-stack design.

Submission Guidelines

For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, please visit the Author Information Page. Please submit papers through the IEEE Author Portal, and select, "Systems for Cryptographic Computing." Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the IEEE Author Portal.

Manuscripts must not exceed 6,000 words, including references, biographies, tables, and figures with captions; each average-size figure counts as 250 words. Abstracts should be no more than 150 words. Manuscripts must not have been previously published or be under review elsewhere, and extensions of conference papers must contain at least 30 percent new material. Authors should clearly identify the new contribution relative to any preliminary version.

Contact Guest Editors at:

• Brandon Reagen, New York University, USA
• Jung Ho Ahn, Seoul National University, South Korea