AMAZE – Recognized as a 2025 Top Pick in Hardware and Embedded Security

Researchers from the STAM Center have received one of the highest recognitions in the hardware security community. The paper, “AMAZE: Accelerated MiMC Hardware Architecture for Zero-Knowledge Applications on the Edge,” was selected as a 2025 Top Pick in Hardware and Embedded Security.

The Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security workshop is an annual event held in conjunction with the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) to recognize research with exceptional long-term impact. The workshop invites nominations from papers published during the previous six years at leading venues in computer architecture, hardware security, and embedded systems, including ISCA, USENIX Security, ASPLOS, DAC, ICCAD, and other premier conferences.

Following a competitive review process, a select group of papers is shortlisted, and their authors are invited to present their work before a panel of distinguished experts. The panel evaluates each paper based on its technical contributions, influence on the field, and long-term significance before selecting the year’s Top Picks. In March 2026, AMAZE was selected as one of only seven papers to receive this distinction for 2025.

Published at ICCAD in 2024, AMAZE introduces a high-performance hardware architecture for accelerating the MiMC, a cryptographic primitive widely used in zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) systems. As zero-knowledge technologies continue to gain importance in privacy-preserving computing, digital identity, blockchain, and secure edge applications, efficient hardware acceleration has become increasingly important. By optimizing the execution of MiMC for resource-constrained platforms, AMAZE makes zero-knowledge applications more practical for edge devices while significantly improving performance and energy efficiency. Read Paper Here

This award-winning research was a collaboration between the STAM Center and researchers from the University of California, San Diego. The research team included Anees Ahmed, Davi Moreno, Nges Brian Njungle, and Prof. Michel A. Kinsy from the STAM Center, together with Dr. Nojan Sheybani, Tengkai Gong, and Prof. Farinaz Koushanfar from UC San Diego.

The selection of AMAZE as a 2025 Top Pick recognizes both the technical innovation of the work and its potential to shape future research in hardware-accelerated cryptographic systems. The STAM Center congratulates the research team on this outstanding achievement and looks forward to continuing its contributions to secure, trustworthy, and high-performance computing technologies.