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The University of Edinburgh has sought to modernise the Darwin Lab building for a number of years. The current proposal envisions the buildings major renovation and recladding to improve the prominent building’s appearance and environmental performance. The renovation of this 10,000 m2 10 storey tower, the development of two other lab buildings totaling 4,300 m2, a new 2000 m2 hub building containing meeting rooms, offices and catering facilities and a large connecting atria space offers the opportunity for the SBS to consolidate their research activities in state of the art facilities that by virtue of their adjacencies support collaboration and cross disciplinary work. The scheme which is currently in its brief development phase is likely to be complete by 2019.

FCBS’s project partner Sam Tyler commented: “We are delighted to have won the commission for this ambitious project. The project presents a number of exciting design and logistical challenges which will need to be resolved in the delivery of an exemplary facility. Head of School David Gray and his team have articulated a clear vision and ambition which has fired up the team in the early stages of this project. The project allows us to continue our exploration of issues around collaborative and flexible working and social environments and to deliver a transformative piece of architecture in the City of Edinburgh.” This is a significant project for Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios as it builds on the laboratory work completed for UCL’s Nanotechnology. This is also the first major commission for the practice in Scotland.

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Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios have recently won the architectural competition to design a series of specialist lab buildings, a new hub space and associated connecting atria. The commission also includes the major renovation and recladding of an existing 1960’s laboratory tower at the centre of the School of Biological Sciences’ Campus. The FCBS team are supported by Belfast based architectural practice Ostick and Williams, to provide lab expertise and WYG for all engineering services.

University of Edinburgh Estates Development Manager Cliff Barraclough said of the FCBS’ winning submission: “The design proposals and delivery approach developed by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios aligned with the aspirations of the school to use the redevelopment of the school’s estate to strengthen its world leading position in biological research. The selection committee was excited by the character of spaces and architectural ambition of their winning scheme.”

In this paper, we introduce OT-PCA, a novel approach for conducting Plaintext-Checking (PC) oracle based side-channel attacks, specifically designed for Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC). By calling the publicly accessible HQC decoder, we build offline templates that enable efficient extraction of soft information for hundreds of secret positions with just a single PC oracle call. Our method addresses critical challenges in optimizing key-related information extraction, including maximizing decryption output entropy and ensuring error pattern independence, through the use of genetic-style algorithms. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our new attack method significantly reduces the required number of oracle calls, achieving a 2.4-fold decrease for hqc-128 and even greater reductions for hqc-192 and hqc-256 compared to current state-of-the-art methods. Notably, the attack shows strong resilience against inaccuracy in the PC oracle—when the oracle accuracy decreases to 95%, the reduction factor in oracle call requirements increases to 7.6 for hqc-128. Lastly, a real-world evaluation conducted using power analysis on a platform with an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller validates the practical applicability and effectiveness of our approach.