This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, CHES 2006, held in Yokohama, Japan in October 2006.

The 32 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 112 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on side channels, low resources, hardware attacks and countermeasures, special purpose hardware, efficient algorithms for embedded processors, side channels, hardware attacks and countermeasures, efficient hardware, trusted computing, side channels, hardware attacks and countermeasures, as well as efficient hardware.