FORTRESS Showcased at the First Edition of WPQC’25 in Munich

On 30 October 2025 the inaugural edition of WPQC’25 — the Workshop on Post-Quantum Cryptography: Resilience, Verification, and Secure Design Automation took place. The event was co-located with ICCAD’25 in Munich, Germany. The event brought together leading experts in cryptography, hardware security, design automation, and system architecture to explore emerging challenges and opportunities at the intersection of PQC and secure hardware design.

As part of the technical programme, FORTRESS delivered a dedicated presentation, led by consortium member Univ.-Prof. Dr. Michael Hutter (Universität der Bundeswehr München / PQShield). Representing one of the project’s core technical work streams, the talk introduced the FORTRESS CHERI-enabled PQ/T Hybrid Root-of-Trust, designed to secure secure-boot and system-integrity workflows in domains such as energy grids, mobility, defence-grade embedded systems, and industrial automation.

The contribution highlighted FORTRESS’s leading role in:

• Combining post-quantum and classical cryptography for long-term resilience
• Designing a verifiable and side-channel-resistant secure-boot chain
• Integrating capability-based memory protection (CHERI) with PQC hardware accelerators
• Bringing a system-level, deployability-focused perspective, a key differentiator noted by workshop participants

Through participation in WPQC’25, FORTRESS strengthened ties with EDA tool developers, hardware designers, and verification researchers working toward trustworthy PQC deployment. These interactions support the project’s mission to deliver open-source demonstrators, reproducible benchmarks, and validated hardware–software co-designs suitable for real-world operational environments.

The FORTRESS consortium thanks the organizers of WPQC’25 for the opportunity to present its work and for fostering a community committed to secure and quantum-resilient European technologies.