These are the proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES 2006) held in Yokohama, Japan, October 10-13, 2006. The CHES workshophas been sponsored by the International Association for Cryptographic Research (IACR) since 2004. The ?rst and the second CHES workshops were held in Worcester in 1999 and 2000, respectively, followed by Paris in 2001, San Francisco Bay Area in 2002, Cologne in 2003, Boston in 2004 and Edinburgh in 2005. This is the ?rst CHES workshop held in Asia. This year, a totalof 112 paper submissionswerereceived.The reviewprocess was...