12/09/2025
Sabancı University, with support from the enCRYPTON project funded by the European Union under the coordination of Erkay Savaş, successfully hosted the 6th International Workshop on Lightweight Cryptography for Security & Privacy (LightSEC 2025). The workshop took place on September 1–2, 2025 at the Conrad İstanbul Bosphorus in Beşiktaş, Istanbul, Türkiye, and was chaired by Erkay Savaş (Sabanci University), Amir Moradi (Technical University of Darmstadt) and Gregor Leander (Ruhr University Bochum).
The LightSEC 2025 conference focused on advancing lightweight and post-quantum cryptography, including homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, secure multi-party computation, blockchain consensus, threshold cryptography, and post-quantum cryptography. Sessions highlighted secure, efficient implementations and acceleration techniques using ASIC, FPGA, and GPU, addressing cryptography needs in AI, blockchain, IoT, and 5G/6G applications. Dr. Mark M. Tehranipoor, Distinguished Professor and Intel Charles E. Young Preeminence Endowed Chair at the University of Florida, gave an invited talk on a multi-agent assistant system leveraging large language models (LLMs) to automate and enhance system-on-chip (SoC) security verification. This innovative approach integrates specialized LLM agents to handle tasks such as verification question answering, security asset identification, threat modeling, test plan and property generation, vulnerability detection, and simulation-based bug validation.
The conference brought together 86 professionals from 18 different countries. Overall, 53.5% of the participants were from Türkiye, while 46.5% joined from abroad, reflecting a strong international presence. Looking at paper acceptance by country, the Netherlands, the UK, and Italy had a 100% acceptance rate. The United States had 94%, Greece 83%, Germany and Norway 50% each, Switzerland 45%, and Türkiye 41%, reflecting a competitive selection process across different regions.
We would like to thank the organizing team, invited speakers, and all participants for their valuable contributions to LightSEC 2025. We look forward to the upcoming discussions and collaborations that will advance homomorphic encryption, advance lightweight and post-quantum cryptography!
